The Key to My Heart Page 5

  “A man,” said Lady Fobham. “How nice.”

  “Through the end window,” said Mrs. Brackett.

  “I don’t blame him,” said Lord Fobham. “I went to dine with a fellow in Rio and half-way through dinner his wife said ‘There’s a man walking round the ceiling’. You’re plastered, Sally.”

  “I’m tight, but I’m not plastered,” said Mrs. Brackett. We all turned to look at the windows. There was nothing to see, but by her voice I knew Mrs. Brackett was not joking.

  “I’ll go and look,” I said and left the room. I went out in the passage, through a large farm scullery to the back door and out into the garden. This part of the garden was sheltered by a high yew hedge and the light from the dining-room lit it fairly well. The night was dark. I was in the shadow, but I could see no one. I was just going inside again when I saw what looked like a large dog jump to the hedge. I went across to look. No sign of a dog. I went right up to the hedge: it was too dense for any dog to get through. And then, as I moved, I trod on something soft. I looked down and there was a man lying under the hedge with his hands hiding his head. I was treading on him. I stepped back.

  “Get up,” I said.

  But before I knew what to do, the man jumped to his feet and paused to stare. That curly hair, that twitch to the face was unmistakable. It was Noisy. He gave a leap and ran to the gate and was out of the garden before I could do anything. I didn’t know what to do. Then I shouted to him. My shout brought out Lord Fobham and Mrs. Brackett, too.

  “Who was it?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He looked like a gypsy.”

  “Get after him,” they cried. So I ran and I could see Noisy dodging along the shadows of the barns; he vaulted a five-barred gate and into the field beyond it. I let him, of course; anyway, though I’ve got long legs I’ve never been much of a runner. Noisy was small, he sprinted fast. I got to the last lot of outbuildings and Mrs. Brackett was coming up, shouting “Where is he?”

  “He’s over the gate and into the field,” I said. In fact, I had not seen where he went.

  Mrs. Brackett and I started for the field, when we heard a car starting up on the other side of the house. “That’s Bertie Fobham,” said Mrs. Brackett, climbing

  over the gate, but at that very moment Lord Fobham came walking up to us.

  Mrs. Brackett had been grinning so far. She loved a hunt. But at this sound of a car driving off and with Lord Fobham beside us her grin went and a look of excited awakeness came to her boyish face.

  “Quick,” she said, pulling me by the coat. We started back. She rushed back through the yard and garden to the house and through it. And then we both stopped. The front door was wide open and where Mrs. Brackett’s case of birds had stood there was now only the stand.

  “It’s Noisy. He’s got them,” said Mrs. Brackett.

  “He can’t have done it alone,” I said.

  We rushed out on to the drive. Lord Fobham’s car was there and so was hers.

  “Get in,” she said. “Bertie’s a dead loss. I bet he’s in the water butt.”

  Far away, a good three-quarters of a mile across the flat fields, we could see the red tail-light of a car turn into the main road and its headlights fan northwards.

  “There are two cars,” I said, pointing to the splashes of light on the trees.

  Mrs. Brackett was a fast driver. We were out of the long deep drive between the rhododendrons, past the estate cottages and in a little more than a minute were going northward on the winding road. Sometimes we saw the tail-light of the other car, sometimes we saw lights daubing the trees. There is a cross-roads not far off and when we were a quarter of a mile off we saw the car turn. As it turned it was picked out by the light of another car which turned in the opposite direction.

  “There you are, two. That’s our van,” I said. Distinctly I saw our green van.

  “What is our van doing up here?”

  Mrs. Brackett did not answer. She had the racing instinct. Given a choice between chasing a van and a racing car, she chose the latter. At the cross-roads we let the van go. There is a high ridge of open common with a narrow, bumpy but straight road rising and falling for miles, running through scattered coppices of ghostly beeches, leaning and flattened, although we were far inland, by the Atlantic winds. The little dot of light in the distance led us on.

  “That’s Noisy,” she said. I said nothing. I was sure it wasn’t.

  For Mrs. Brackett it must have been like the old days, the revival of those fierce pursuits of her married life. Her cheek bones were set, her eyes were happy. The wind blew her hair back and I saw her strong straight forehead; and all the time she drove, she was turning her head and talking to me, but in an inspired way, keeping an eye on the leaping road.

  “Where did you meet Claudia?” she said as the needle rose steadily on the speedometer. “At a dance, I see. Which dance? When was that? And then you took her home? Is that when you got engaged? In the car? How old is she? Gosh, she’s young.”

  I answered the questions. Suddenly Mrs. Brackett turned her head and came out with a blunt question.

  “You’re not in love with her, are you?” she said. “All right, you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think you are in love with her. They’ve no money, you know.”

  “I’m not interested in money,” I said violently.

  “Keep your hair on,” she said. Her voice changed and became nervous. “You don’t like me, do you? All right, don’t answer that one. When are you going to be married?”

  “Not for a long time,” I said to stop her talking.

  “I think you’re wise,” she said. “It’d be unfair on her. We’re gaining.”

  And we were. The other car was not more than half a mile ahead. I had been trying to get a real sight of it for a long time. I was trying to think whose car it was for I was convinced that Noisy was in our van, though how he had got it unless, of course, he had pitched some tale to Mother, I couldn’t imagine.

  “We’ve got him,” said Mrs. Brackett and, in her excitement, squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers. Almost at once, the engine spluttered, our speed died. Within fifty yards we stopped and the other car was away over the brow of the next hill.

  The silence of the country flowed in on us.

  “Well”, said Mrs. Brackett.

  “Sorry,” I said and let Mrs. Brackett’s hand go. I don’t know why I had held it.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Brackett, taking her hand away. No petrol. It was the old story: Mrs. Brackett was too mean to fill up her car. It had happened over and over again in her pursuits of Noisy. We all knew it. I smiled. She looked small, indignant and surprised, like a child. We sat there staring on the dead road, in the night silence of the Common, listening to the engine cool and to the small movements of animals in the gorse.

  “Bad luck,” said Mrs. Brackett. “Damn.” She pulled her dress down over her knees.

  “Bertie Fobham will be along in a minute,” she said.

  “If he got out of the water butt,” I said. “He’s probably followed the van.”

  “Yes, the van. What’s going on between you and Noisy?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She studied me. Then she gave that small shake to her head which either meant she was changing her mind about something or telling a whopper. She sat up straight.

  “All right,” she said. “Have it your own way. I’ll tell you something. They’re his bloody birds. Not mine. I kept them. I knew he’d come for them. I wanted him to, that’s why I kept them. Now he’s got them, he can keep them. That’s funny—I don’t want to see him any more. He’s sweet, I was mad about him and I was damn pretty when I married him—but from a woman’s point of view, he’s no good. He wants a mother. Someone to pet him,” she said slyly, “and cash his cheques.”

  “He told me he was going to get the birds. I thought it was one of his jokes,” I said. I told her the story.

  “Honour bright?”
she said, like a schoolgirl. Then she added, “Typical Noisy to come and peep through the window. I expect he’s fallen for your Claudia.”

  She glanced shrewdly to see how I would take that.

  “All right,” she said. “Another failure. Wash it out. That’s the rotten attractive thing about him—he likes risk.”

  It was no good sitting there. Lord Fobham was obviously not coming to look for us. There were never any cars on that road at this time of night. It was unlikely there would even be a night lorry. It was four miles to Tolton, the nearest garage. I moved to get out.

  “Where are you going?” she said, pulling my arm.

  “I’m going to walk to Tolton to get some petrol,” I said.

  “I’m not going to stay here alone to be raped by some gamekeeper and I’m not going to walk,” she said, “not in these shoes.” I sat back.

  “So that’s that,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

  “That’s that,” she said. “What are you worrying about?”

  “Claudia,” I said. “Who’s going to take her home?” She considered this.

  “The Major,” she said. “I’m sure he clocks her in and out, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  Mrs. Brackett moved towards me.

  “Poor Mr. Fraser,” she said putting her arm in mine and resting her head on my shoulder. “Always in car trouble.”

  Yes, I thought, the Major will fetch her. And with that, my conscience was set free. I moved Mrs. Brackett’s arm away and she sat up with annoyance for a second, then I put my arm round her and she put her head on my shoulder again.

  “Mr. Fraser,” she said. “You’re an old hand, aren’t you? I bet you’ll kiss me next.”

  I did kiss her.

  “Well that took a long time,” she said. “About a year by my reckoning. All right, don’t speak.” She suddenly laughed.

  “Do you know, when Bertie Fobham offered me fifty pounds for those birds I nearly closed on it. We could have loaded them up ourselves.”

  I kissed her again. She drew away from me and said:

  “I suppose you know what you’re doing?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said and I was speaking the truth. I tried to pull her to me, but adroitly she opened the door of the car and stepped out.

  “Let us walk up and down,” she said, “and listen to the owls.” And so we walked up and down a hundred times, I should think, asking me questions about myself, the shop and about Mother; she talked about the first time I went up to Heading to ask her to pay her bill.

  “Gosh!” she said.

  “You’re lucky,” she went on. “You’ve got your head screwed on.”

  We must have walked up and down until two in the morning and then there were lights on the road. A lorry came along after all. We siphoned some petrol and then drove back.

  “You drive,” she said and I did, with my arm round her waist. I could feel the heat of her face through my jacket. There was no one at Heading, of course, when we got there. At a quarter to three Claudia rang up while Mrs. Brackett and I were having a drink. I explained to Claudia what had happened. She said simply:

  “Oh! Why aren’t you at home?”

  And rang off.

  I don’t know what time I got home. Now and then through the breaking mackerel sky, the September moon dodged in and out as I drove back. No longer the big yellow moon of the night when I got myself engaged to Claudia, but white, half gone and tipped up. It seemed as it went in and out of the clouds to be turning towards me and turning away, like Mrs. Brackett’s busy, chattering head when the chase was on. The next morning Claudia broke off our engagement. Mrs. Dingle and the Major sent the announcement to The Times.

  * * *

  Mother didn’t say anything until the afternoon. She shut herself up in the office and went through the bills.

  “Staying out all night round the lanes with a married woman ten years older than yourself,” Mother said. “I don’t blame the girl.”

  The word “lanes” meant only one thing to Mother.

  “Two pounds three—what is this?” said Mother, reading from a bill. “I’m glad you’re out of it. Now we’ll get some work done.”

  “I’d still be in it,” I said, “if you hadn’t let Noisy wheedle the van out of you.”

  “He brought it back. It’s in the garage, you can see it. He thanked me. I don’t often get thanks.”

  She looked wistfully at another bill and then at me.

  “I don’t know what he is up to and I wouldn’t believe him if he told me. I knew he’d break his promise and not go back to her.” She sighed with pleasure. “A woman’s a fool who believes a word that comes out of Noisy.”

  Then Mother took off her glasses and began a tirade.

  “And another thing. I may be an old woman—but don’t think I’m blind. Don’t think I don’t know what brought Mrs. Brackett down here, paying her bill, as large as life, asking you up there and all that la-di-da soft soap about how pleased I must be and that this Claudia was the most wonderful girl in the world. I said to her ‘Well, Mrs. Brackett, it will work itself out one way or the other, won’t it? I could put my oar in, but I won’t. It never lasts with him and I’m not breaking my heart.’ ”

  Mother paused. A memory distracted her.

  “The second time she came, she bought three dozen meringues,” she said. “Did she give you any last night? Well, they keep.”

  “But,” said Mother getting up from Father’s old desk and flushing up with temper. “If you think I talked Mrs. Brackett into breaking it up, you’re a very wicked boy. . .”

  “I didn’t say anything of the sort,” I said.

  “Think, I said, not say,” said Mother.

  And after that, I did begin to think and the more I thought the more I remembered what Father used to say about Mother’s conscience.

  Mother put her hand on the desk.

  “Oh, you’ve upset me, with all this love,” she said. She had gone pale. She had frightened herself.

  “And now I suppose it will be Mrs. Brackett down here day and night, forty-five if she’s a day, buying meringues and congress tarts until she’s sick and you’ll be hiding, all innocent, in the bakehouse, leaving it to your Mother. I wouldn’t be that woman’s dressmaker.”

  Mother went to the mirror over the mantelpiece and fiddled with her hair. “Age is what you feel,” she said, getting ready for the battle.

  3

  Noisy in the Doghouse

  “Sorry to hear about you and Claudia, Bob”, Noisy Brackett said, finishing a glass of beer and leaving me at the Crown one morning. “The Fairy Queen on the job again, I suppose? Take a tip from me. The next time you get engaged to a lovely thing like Claudia, steer clear of Fairy Queens. They turn funny when they see another girl get her man. Their little brains start working.”

  Noisy knew the whole story. Everyone in our town knew it. When I walked up the street, everyone from the dogs upward was silently giving me advice: “Fall for a divorced woman, ten years older than yourself [and some said twenty]—don’t be a fool, boy!” I despised them all, but not Noisy. He had been married to her, I was in love with her; he and I were the only normal men in the town, and that was a thought I clung to. For the more I loved her the more I wanted to be saved from her, and Noisy was a living example of that salvation.

  One good thing—the weather broke. Gales blew over the countryside and tore down the telephone wires. We were cut off from Heading for a day or two. Mother had a fright when the chimney caught fire at the back of our bakery; she thought the shop had gone. This, and the sign blowing off at the café, kept me outside and out of her sight. She had got as nervy as the weather. When I got in, I would find her sitting beside Father’s photograph, which stood on a table by the window. She would get up and move about the room, trying the brown

  leather chair of the three-piece first, but it disagreed with her in some way. She moved to the next chair and glared back at the other as i
f it had deceived her. But now her arms couldn’t settle to this one either, and she lifted her elbow to see why. Then her knees got annoyed, and with a groan she got up and returned to the upright chair by the window and turned Father’s photograph an inch or so to the light, as if she were trying to shake him into talking to her.

  This happened night after night. While Mother was doing this, I had one eye on her and one on the newspaper, but my mind was four miles away, up at Heading with Mrs. Brackett, trying to catch sight of her face as it floated by, but all I could see was the drawing-room there and its three white-painted doors—the door she and I had come in by that night, the open door leading to the room where her farming papers were scattered over the floor, and a third door at the end of the room, which was closed. I never knew a door so closed. It watched us like a conscience. It seemed even to watch me now when I was at home. I could hear Mrs. Brackett saying, “What are you doing here at this time of night, Mr. Fraser?” But the only thing I could remember was the parting in her hair, for she had kept her head lowered when she was sitting beside me. After that, I would try without any luck to see again that small movement in the pupils of her blue eyes, a movement as tiny as the click of a camera shutter, when she looked up to say goodbye. I was going to say, “Where does that door lead to?” but the sight of her eyes taking a cool snapshot of what was going on inside me stopped me, and like a fool, I left.

  I used to look at Mother over my paper. She would be staring at me, afraid of me and herself. We could not go on like this. So one evening when I came in from the Crown, I dived into it. I thought I would make her laugh. “Major Dingley says I ought to be horsewhipped,” I said.

  No answer from Mother.

  “He said it to Lord Fobham over at the Crown. Noisy told me,” I said.

  Mother was still silent, but when Noisy’s name came up she reached for her handbag and looked for the mirror.

  “Lord Fobham said—” I went on.

  “I don’t want to know what Lord Fobham or any of those pots said,” Mother said.

  And she didn’t. Mother thought it was wrong to know what people like that talked about, just as she mistrusted foreigners. They were “daft”, and she was sorry for them.