Another world, p.16
Another World, page 16
‘So that’s where you went.’
‘Silly old fool,’ Jones said. ‘I thought he was going to cry. His sister’s quite right, Mrs Gandell. Two men with white coats will call and collect. Things he said to me. Wanted to laugh, and I didn’t, wanted to rush away, and I didn’t, even wanted to be sick, but I wasn’t. Asked me about the letters he pushed under her door.’ Jones paused, leaned in, ‘How the hell did he get in, Mrs Gandell?’ Mrs Gandell didn’t know.
‘All the doors in the house wide open, and no fire, and the curtain flying out of the bedroom window, and him sitting in his study.’
‘You went in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
The Jones salvo came unexpectedly. ‘Because he’s a man, Mrs Gandell, because he’s Welsh, because he’s a man of God, because he’s mad, because he’s lost, because he’s afraid, because he wants to, because he’s really fallen for the quiet, secret bitch upstairs.’
‘Jones,’ exclaimed Mrs Gandell, ‘Jones.’
‘Even the cat would have been sorry for him.’
‘Poor Mr Thomas,’ she said.
‘I told him about the man from Melin,’ Jones said, and so quietly that Mrs Gandell sat up in her chair, saying, ‘What’s that, Jones?’
‘I told him about the man from Melin.’
‘The man from Melin?’
‘Just like the man from Penuel,’ replied Jones, and then cautiously, ‘Well, nearly.’
‘What on earth are you talking about, Jones?’ and she grabbed him, pulled him across the table. ‘Have you been drinking again?’
‘Smell?’
She smelt, pushed him away again. ‘Well?’
‘He had middle years, and they sat heavy on him, just like Mr Thomas, but she was different .…’
‘The what?’
‘The girl. Fifteen and a half she was. Big difference in years, Mrs Gandell, just think of that. Bigger sin. Know what they did?’
‘Who? What?’
‘They locked him in his own chapel, and flung his sheepdog in after him, drew barbed wire all round it, nailed the door, and the leading crusader shouted through the window, “Pray, murderer”. And the one that was fifteen was up in the mountains. Her father lashed the sin, Mrs Gandell.’
Mrs Gandell covered her face. ‘How awful,’ she said.
‘Some things are. He prayed in the dark, and the sheepdog howled Amen.’
‘How dreadful, Jones,’ said Mrs Gandell, and her hands came slowly down and rested on the table. ‘Is that true?’
‘Have I ever lied to you, Mrs Gandell?’ He flung it at her, an ultimatum. ‘Well, have I?’
She did not answer him. The cigarette burned her fingers, and she flung it away, and lit another one. ‘How sad, Jones,’ she said.
‘Some things are. You could actually see it inside him, like a kind of crab, writhing.’
‘That’s enough, Jones.’
He leaned across the table, and said slowly, with a clipped utterance, ‘I told Mr Thomas to get up, to shake himself. I told him to rush away and take her. Have her. Be done with it.’
‘That’s enough,’ shouted Mrs Gandell, ‘and I mean enough.’
But it wasn’t, not for Jones, and, putting a hand over her hand, said, ‘They say that the man from Melin was so tense that when he fell on her, he nearly pulled a nail from the cross.’
‘You told Thomas that?’ she said.
As though the whole world was standing in the dining-room, Jones’s voice faded to a whisper, and suddenly she put a hand over his mouth. ‘That’s enough.’
‘I told him to leave his collar off, Mrs Gandell. It’s another dimension.’
‘Disgusting.’
She got up and walked quickly out of the room.
‘But real, Mrs Gandell, real,’ Jones said, and followed her out, and up the stairs. He closed the bedroom door, and Mrs Gandell went and stood at the window for a moment, and then sat down. It was at this moment that Jones noticed the open book lying on the bedside table. He clapped hands to his head. ‘Oh no,’ he thought, ‘not again,’ seeing what he called the Dumas bible. ‘Another bloody chapter.’ Dumas was merciless to Jones, but Mrs Gandell enjoyed him. She watched him place a tentative finger on the open book.
‘You can read to me till supper time, Jones,’ she said.
‘Very well,’ said Jones, and wished the Musketeers direct to hell.
10
When Miss Vaughan came swinging through the door in her red two piece, bag tight under one arm, and her red raincoat over the other, Mair knew it was Wednesday. She leaned over to Nancy, saying ‘Silly old bitch,’ just as Mr Blair himself was through the door.
‘What was that?’ Mr Blair said, tall over the low desk.
‘Nothing, sir,’ Mair said.
‘I’m glad it is nothing, Miss Beynon,’ he replied, and swept on to his office.
‘Why don’t you leave her alone?’ asked Nancy.
‘She’s still a silly old bitch,’ Mair said, and then got down to her typing. She rarely lifted her head above the machine until lunch time. Mair was like that; she often felt the weight of the world on her back. She was sixteen, and in two years Mr Blair would throw her through the door. Mair knew this, and didn’t care. Nancy was seventeen, and would only have to wait another year. They watched Miss Vaughan hang up her coat, put away her bag, and then the bell rang, and she went off to attend to Mr Blair.
‘D’you think she’ll marry the Colonel?’ Nancy ventured to say, and Mair barked back that she couldn’t care less, and took another glance at the clock, the first of many, and at twelve-thirty promptly she would leave the office and hurry all the way home to Penrhyn Terrace. Mam would fuss about getting her lunch, and she would throw the transistor switch and sink into the chair, and listen to Tom. The world loved Tom, and so did Mair.
‘Did you talk to Mr Wilkins?’ Mam enquired, and Mair said, yes, she had, but it was the same message as last week and last month, the same words.
‘I’ll never get a raise whilst she’s there,’ Mair said, and Mam knew who she was, and said, ‘Come long, get your lunch.’
‘She works for less money than we do, Mam,’ Mair said.
‘You told me that.’
‘I shan’t stay there,’ she said.
‘You told me that, too,’ Mam said, and served her with crisps and fish fingers.
‘I want to go away, Mam.’
Mam sat, studied her. ‘Don’t we all?’
‘You flatten everything I say,’ Mair said.
‘Perhaps he’ll sack Miss Vaughan,’ Mam said.
‘Miss Vaughan might die.’
‘That’s an awful thing to say, dear.’
‘What isn’t awful,’ replied Mair, and increased Tom’s volume, and turned her back on her mother, announcing very directly that she was finished.
‘Your father still thinks you should have stayed on at school,’ Mam said.
‘Aw,’ exclaimed Mair, looked daggers at Mam. ‘What for?’
Mair was sparing of brains, and didn’t mind very much.
‘What for?’ Mam said.
And Mair wished that everyone over sixteen was stone dead.
Hammering away at her machine, Mair thought about yesterday, about Mam, and was reconciled to the fact that tomorrow would be no different. It had taken her some time to get used to Miss Vaughan. ‘Good morning, Miss Vaughan,’ Mair would say, and Miss Vaughan would smile, and say nothing. She was like that. Even Nancy remembered. Unlike Mair, Nancy Evans always had her lunch at the Blue Bird Cafe in the High Street. She ate fishpaste sandwiches and nibbled at digestive biscuits, and often drank three cups of tea. She thought of Miss Vaughan as being rather superior, but would never dream of conveying this to Mair, whose tongue, she thought, was already sharp enough. They heard the door open and close, and Miss Vaughan emerged from the private sanctum bearing a great sheaf of papers, which she shared with both.
‘Type these letters,’ she said.
They took the letters, did not look up, and did not answer her. It caused no concern at all to Miss Vaughan, since she didn’t notice them very often; perhaps Mair and Nancy were there by accident. She then returned to Mr Blair’s office, hovered over his desk, ready to do her duty.
‘Do sit down, Miss Vaughan,’ Mr Blair said, and she sat down, facing the safe, the door of which lay wide open. This safe almost burst at the seams, a rich history of people, dead and alive, town secrets, big secrets, little ones. Miss Vaughan had once been allowed to approach it, and to put away some papers, and had had a shock as she knelt there, feeling something that gave her a slight shiver, so that she turned quickly to Mr Blair, saying ‘There’s something not right in here, Mr Blair,’ and groped, and eventually brought to view the petrified remains of a dead seagull. Mr Blair had simply said, ‘H’m! Toms,’ algebra to Miss Vaughan, but for him just one of the jokes of a very late office boy. And ever since, girls, and girls only, had been the order of the day. The silence of the office was broken only by the crackle of papers. Mr Blair almost lay over the desk, studying them. Miss Vaughan had taken off her spectacles, and was cleaning them when he looked up. The red-rimmed eyes surprised him, roused curiosity.
‘Miss Vaughan!’
Miss Vaughan was stiff, attentive in a moment.
‘Yes, Mr Blair?’
‘Have you been crying, Miss Vaughan?’
She put back her spectacles, and said quietly, ‘No sir, I haven’t.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said, and bent once more to his task.
‘There’ll be the bank, and the post office today,’ he said. ‘Before lunch.’
‘Yes, Mr Blair’, and Mr Blair finished with the papers, sat back in his chair.
‘My wife was really disappointed the other day that you could not come to tea, Miss Vaughan.’
‘I never go to tea,’ Miss Vaughan replied.
And Blair faltered, fragmented the reply. ‘Yes. Of course. Indeed. We understand.’
Miss Vaughan again said thank you, and then got up and went into the outer office.
‘Ready?’ asked Miss Vaughan.
And again the typists did not answer, and did not look up at her. Miss Vaughan was not concerned, just as though it were the thing to do. She returned to Mr Blair’s room with the letters, and put them on his desk for signature.
‘I could catch the twelve-thirty post with them, Mr Blair.’
A dragged ‘Yes’ from Mr Blair, and he paused, looked at her, his pen in the air. ‘Miss Vaughan?’
‘Yes, Mr Blair?’
There was a sudden softening of the Blair features, almost as if he was on the point of smiling, but Miss Vaughan seemed concerned only with his eyes. She could not recall her employer ever taking such a long look as this.
‘Yes sir?’ she said.
‘You do not appear to me to like people very much,’ said Mr Blair, and immediately he saw the Vaughan eyes close behind the spectacles.
‘Some people are nice,’ she replied, and opened them again.
Mr Blair resumed signing the letters, and he thought that this was the closest he had ever got to his so efficient secretary. Miss Vaughan listened to the scratching of the pen.
Still scratching, Mr Blair said, laughingly, ‘I know of course that just being a person can be something of a nuisance.’ Miss Vaughan said nothing, and her eye followed the moving pen.
‘There,’ said Mr Blair, and sat up.
She was still quiet in her chair, motionless, waiting again.
Though the question shot right out of the blue, it did not disturb Miss Vaughan.
‘Miss Vaughan?’
‘Yes, Mr Blair?’
‘You are happy here?’ he asked.
‘I am happy here,’ she said, and, knowing her, Mr Blair accepted it as final.
‘I’m glad,’ he said.
She gave him her first smile of the day.
‘If you should change your mind, Miss Vaughan, there is still the spare room at Ty Baen.’
Miss Vaughan said she was quite content, and added, for good measure, ‘Thank you, Mr Blair.’
In a moment she realised that the strict rhythm of Mr Blair’s day was becoming relaxed, since he did not hand her the letters to fold up and finally seal, but now sat back in his chair, and said casually, ‘A friend of mine came to see me the other day, Miss Vaughan, a very respectable woman indeed, some trouble about her brother. She was very worried about him. Some kind of emotional upset.’ He paused, then offered her his usual smile. ‘Apparently her brother has fallen in love with a woman in the town. I said no, since I never deal with the cases of friends.’ And after another short pause, ‘Get these letters away, Miss Vaughan,’ and he handed her the small black briefcase that he had just taken from the bottom drawer of his desk. ‘The bank first, Miss Vaughan, and then the post office.’
She folded the letters, put them in their envelopes, sealed them, and got up. She had not heard a single word of what Mr Blair had been saying, for the captain of the ship that could never sail had been talking into her ear for the past five minutes, so Miss Vaughan was worried again; she had cried in her dream about this unfortunate ship, her more unfortunate captain.
‘Seventeen letters, Miss Vaughan,’ said Mr Blair.
‘Oh - - - yes - - that’s right, Mr Blair. Thank you,’ and left the office, leaving Mr Blair staring at the glass panelled door, long after she had departed.
‘A strange women’ he thought. Excellent at her job, never complains, always punctual, best he’d ever had – but – in personal matters, so remote, sometimes so odd, so withdrawn, so private, and had a momentary vision of Miss Vaughan wearing a large white card round her neck on which was printed in large black letters, DON’T TOUCH. He gave a quiet chuckle, and then got down to his work again.
Miss Vaughan, meanwhile, proceeded towards the bank and the post office, though, and it was unusual for her, she had slackened her pace. The ship’s captain no longer whispered in her ear. It had been replaced by a sudden awesome joy that spread like light throughout her whole body, remembering as she did the words of Mr Blair’s that had been so quiet and casual, so that once again she had the heightened awareness, and final knowledge that the man from Penuel was again behind her, a black funeral, ponderous and slow, his black Homburg stiff on his head, enveloped in his black overcoat. She had felt him outside the office, felt him outside Cartref, in the High Street, and smiled her secret smile. Her awesome joy increased, remembering that not once had she turned her head to look at him, and would not smile at a man that depended on them. But now, just as she came in sight of the bank, she did suddenly stop dead, and turn very slowly round and look back. He was not there. There was nobody there. She increased her pace, and stepped into the bank.
‘Silly man,’ she thought, as she handed in Mr Blair’s income for one whole week.
‘Good morning, Miss Vaughan,’ the clerk said, half smiling, then suddenly grim. ‘Please sit down.’
She sat down, opened her bag, examined herself in the mirror, put it back again, got up, and began pacing the room, whilst the clerk went hurriedly and accurately through the cheques before him. He then made out the receipt and called her.
‘Thank you, Miss Vaughan. Good morning.’
‘Good morning,’ and Miss Vaughan continued her journey to the post office.
She thought of Mr Blair, pressing in his invitation to tea at his home, the offer of a room there. It occasioned no smile, inside or outside.
Having done her business with the post office, Miss Vaughan continued down the High Street, finally turning in at the Blue Bird Cafe for her usual cup of coffee. It was empty, so she rang the little bell at her table, with an idle glance at the cafe’s sentry-box, and then saw the girl come from behind the blue curtains. They knew each other only by sight.
‘Good morning, m’am.’
‘Good morning. Coffee, please.’
The girl served her, vanished behind the curtains and left Miss Vaughan sitting by the window, slowly sipping her coffee. And again the dream was live, and again the captain was there. She thought of this, she thought hard about it. Was the boat still there, flagless, the hatches still off, the holds gaping. Was the anchor still clinging to the bottom of the sea? She put down the cup, she closed her eyes.
‘He was just going to tell me about that anchor when I woke up,’ thought Miss Vaughan. ‘I wonder now, I wonder.’ Never sailing at all, and the poor Captain on the poop, quite alone, poor derelict man, and staring to every point of the compass, and the wind, the wind. Perhaps if the weather changed all would be different, that anchor come up, the sound of it like music in the Captain’s ears, the drag and the pull and the triumph of it breaking dead water, at last. And she was close to the ship now, and close to the man. And with him she slowly raised her head, looked balefully at the sky. ‘Terrible,’ thought Miss Vaughan. ‘Terrible.’ She thought of the crew, hidden, buried away in ship’s holes, silent in the silence, not daring to move, wanting to, looking up, daring themselves not to look up. If the weather changed, if the sky cleared, if the still ship trembled, broke free of the prison. ‘Poor Captain,’ she thought. ‘Poor man.’
She was still alone in the room, hard by the window, looking out, beyond the High Street, beyond the town. The coffee had gone cold. She had forgotten it was there, didn’t see the face of the girl watching through the curtains, the eyes asking, a silence waiting to be broken.
‘More coffee, ma’m,’ she called, her face free of the blue surrounds, and Miss Vaughan’s hand twitched violently, and the cup shook, and she looked at the girl, held the cup in the air.
‘Thank you,’ Miss Vaughan said, and waited.
The girl hovered and smiled, ‘A little sun today,’ she said.
‘I see there is,’ Miss Vaughan said, not seeing, but listening.
‘You haven’t been crying, Miss Vaughan?’ and in a moment Mr Blair was there, looking at her, studying her, looking at her eyes, red eyes, perhaps thinking, ‘Poor Miss Vaughan.’
The traffic rolled by, people passed the window, but the High Street was no longer there, and she saw only the sea, a vivid blue, a faint, thin ration of sun today for Garthmeilo. That’s what the girl said to her, ‘A little bit of sun today.’ She hadn’t noticed it, smelling only the sea, hearing the roar of it. It came through the window, washed about her table. The clock in the cafe chimed, she heard it, and was back in the world again. She got up and made for the door, and the girl came violently from behind the curtains and followed her to the door, opened it, and gave her an expensive smile. ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ The Blue Bird was glad of any business, even with half cups. Miss Vaughan said nothing and closed the door behind her, and made her way back to the offices of Blair and Wilkins.
