Collected Stories

Mags

Neither Julia nor James could remember a time when Mags had not been there. She was part of the family, although neither a relation nor a connection. Long before either of them had been born she’d been, at school, their mother’s best friend.

They were grown up now and had children of their own; the Memory Lane they travelled down at Mags’s funeral was long; it was impossible not to recall the past there’d been with her. ‘Our dear sister,’ the clergyman in the crematorium murmured, and quite abruptly Julia’s most vivid memory was of being on the beach at Rustington playing ‘Mags’s Game’, a kind of Grandmother’s Footsteps; and James remembered how Mags had interceded when his crime of taking unripe grapes from the greenhouse had been discovered. Imposing no character of its own upon the mourners, the crematorium filled easily with such moments, with summer jaunts and treats in teashops, with talk and stories and dressing up for nursery plays, with Mags’s voice for ever reading the adventures of the Swallows and the Amazons.

Cicily, whose friend at school she’d been, remembered Miss Harper being harsh, accusing Mags of sloth and untidiness, and making Mags cry. There’d been a day when everyone had been made to learn ‘The Voice and the Peak’ and Miss Harper, because of her down on Mags, had made it seem that Mags had brought this communal punishment about by being the final straw in her ignorance of the verb craindre. There’d been, quite a few years later, Mags’s ill-judged love affair with Robert Blakley, the callousness of Robert’s eventual rejection of her, and Mags’s scar as a result: her lifelong fear of ever again getting her fingers burnt in the same way. In 1948, when Cicily was having James, Mags had come to stay, to help and in particular to look after Julia, who was just beginning to toddle. That had been the beginning of helping with the children; in 1955 she’d moved in after a series of au pair girls had proved in various ways to be less than satisfactory. She’d taken over the garden; her coffee cake became a family favourite.

Cosmo, Cicily’s husband, father of James and Julia, recalled at Mags’s funeral his first meeting with her. He’d heard about her – rather a lot about her – ever since he’d known Cicily. The unfairness that had been meted out to Mags at school was something he had nodded sympathetically over; as well as over her ill-treatment at the hands of Robert Blakley, and the sudden and unexpected death of her mother, to whom she’d always been so devoted, and with whom, after the Robert Blakley affair, she had determined to make her life, her father having died when she was three. This is Mags,’ Cicily had said one day in the Trocadero, where they were all about to lunch together, celebrating Cicily’s and Cosmo’s engagement. ‘Hullo, Cosmo,’ Mags had said, holding out a hand for him to shake. She did not much care for men he’d thought, gripping the hand and moving it slightly in a handshake. She was tall and rather angular, with black untidy hair and unplucked eyebrows. Her lips were a little chapped; she wore no make-up. It was because of Robert Blakley, he’d thought, that she did not take to men. ‘I’ve heard an awful lot about you, Mags,’ he said, laughing. She declined a drink, falling instead into excited chat with Cicily, whose cheeks had pinkened with pleasure at the reunion. They talked about girls they’d known, and the dreadful Miss Harper, and Miss Roforth the headmistress. At Mags’s funeral he remembered that surreptitiously he had asked the waiter to bring him another gin and tonic.

They were a noticeably good-looking family. Cosmo and Cicily, in their middle fifties, were grey-haired but stylishly so, and both of them retained the spare figures of their youth. Cosmo’s noticeably blue eyes and his chiselled face had been bequeathed to his son; and Cicily’s smile, her slightly slanting mouth and perfect nose had come to Julia. They all looked a little similar, the men of a certain height, the two women complementing it, the same fair colouring in all four. There was a lack of awkwardness in their movements, a natural easiness that had often caused strangers to wonder where Mags came in.

The coffin began to move, sliding towards beige curtains, which obediently parted. Flames would devour it, they all four thought simultaneously, Mags would become a handful of dust; a part of the family had been torn away. How, Julia wondered, would her parents manage now? To be on their own after so long would surely be a little strange.

They returned to Tudors, the house near Maidenhead where the family had always lived. It was a pleasant house, half-timbered, black and white, more or less in the country. Cosmo had been left it by an aunt at just the right moment, when he’d been at the beginning of his career in the rare-books world; Julia and James had been born there. Seeing Tudors for the first time, Mags had said she’d fallen in love with it.

After the funeral service they stood around in the long low-ceilinged sitting-room, glad that it was over. They didn’t say much, and soon moved off in two directions, the men to the garden, Cicily and Julia to the room that had been Mags’s bedroom. In an efficiently drawn-up will some of her jewellery had been left to Julia and an eighteenth-century clock to James. There’d been bequests for Cicily and Cosmo too, and some clothes and money for Mrs Forde, the daily woman at Tudors.

‘Her mother had that,’ Cicily said, picking up an amber brooch, a dragon with a gold setting. ‘I think it’s rather valuable.’

Julia held it in the palm of her hand, gazing at it. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. It had been Mags’s favourite piece, worn only on special occasions. Julia could remember it on a blue blouse, polka-dotted with white. It seemed unfair that Mags, the same age as her mother, should have died; Mags who had done no harm to anyone. Having never been married or known children of her own, it seemed that the least she deserved was a longer life.

‘Poor old Mags,’ her mother said, as if divining these thoughts.

‘You’ll miss her terribly.’

‘Yes, we shall.’

In the garden Cosmo walked with his son, who happened in that moment to be saying the same thing.

‘Yes, Cicily’ll miss her,’ Cosmo replied. ‘Dreadfully.’

‘So’ll you, Father.’

‘Yes, I shall too.’

The garden was as pleasant as the house, running down to the river, with japonica and escallonia now in bloom on a meadow bank. It was without herbaceous borders, sheltered by high stone walls. Magnolias and acers added colour to the slope of grass that stretched from wall to wall. Later there’d be roses and broom. It was Mags who had planned the arrangement of all these shrubs, who had organized the removal of some cherry trees that weren’t to her liking, and had every week in summer cut the grass with her Flymo. It was generally agreed that her good taste had given the garden character.

‘There’d been some man, hadn’t there?’ James asked his father as they stood on the bank of the river, watching pleasure boats go by.

‘Robert Blakley. Oh, a long time ago.’

‘But it left a mark?’

‘Yes, it left a mark.’

In the room that had been Mags’s bedroom Cicily said:

‘Misfortune came easily to her. It somehow seemed quite expected that Robert Blakley should let her down.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Just said he’d made a mistake and walked away.’

‘Perhaps it was as well if he was like that.’

‘I never liked him.’

It seemed to Cicily, and always had, that though misfortune had come easily to her friend it had never been deserved. The world had sinned against her without allowing her the joy of sinning. Ready-made a victim, she’d been supplied with no weapons that Cicily could see as useful in her own defence. The best thing that had happened in Mags’s life might well have been their long friendship and Mags’s involvement with the family.

Before lunch they all had a glass or two of sherry because they felt they needed it. It cheered them up, as the lunch itself did. But even so, as Julia said goodbye to her parents, she wondered again how well they’d manage now. She said as much to James as they drove away together in his car, the French clock carefully propped on the back seat, the jewellery in Julia’s handbag. When all these years there’d been a triangular quality about conversation in Tudors, how would conversation now continue?

It would not continue, Cosmo thought. There would be silences in Tudors, for already he could feel them gathering. On summer weekends he would start the Flymo for Cicily; they would go as usual to the Borders in July. But as they perused the menu in the bar of the Glenview Hotel they’d dread the moment when the waiter took it from them, when they could put off no longer the conversation that eluded them. At Christmas it would be all right because, as usual, Julia and James and the children would come to Tudors, but in the bleak hours after they’d left the emptiness would have an awful edge. Mags had chattered so.

Changing out of the sober clothes she’d worn for the funeral, Cicily recalled a visit with Mags to Fenwick’s. It was she who had suggested it, 1969 it must have been, ‘I insist,’ she’d said. ‘Absolutely no arguments.’ The fact was, Mags hadn’t bought herself so much as a new scarf for years. As a girl, she’d always done her best, but living in Tudors, spending most of her day in the garden, she’d stopped bothering. ‘And if Fenwick’s haven’t anything then we go to Jaeger’s,’ Cicily had insisted. ‘We’re going to spend the whole day sorting you out.’ Mags of course had protested, but in the end had agreed. She was quite well off, having inherited a useful income from her mother; she could easily afford to splash out.

But in the event she didn’t. In Fenwick’s the saleswoman was rude. She shook her head repeatedly when Mags stood in front of a looking-glass, first in yellow and then in blue. ‘Not entirely madam’s style,’ she decreed. ‘More yours, madam,’ she suggested to Cicily. In the end they’d left the shop without anything and instead of going on to Jaeger’s went to Dickins and Jones for coffee. Mags wept, not noisily, not making a fuss. She cried with her head bent forward so that people wouldn’t see. She apologized and then confessed that she hated shopping for clothes: it was always the same, it always went wrong. Saleswomen sighed when they saw her coming. Almost before she could open her mouth she became the victim of their tired feet.

They went to D. H. Evans that day and bought a dreary wool dress in a shade of granite. It made Mags look like an old-age pensioner. ‘Really nice,’ the saleswoman assured them. ‘Really suits the lady.’

That was the trouble, Cicily reflected as she hung up the coat she’d worn for the funeral: Mags had never had the confidence to fight back. She should have pointed out to the saleswoman in Fenwick’s that the choice was hers, that she didn’t need to be told what her style was. She should have protested that Miss Harper was being unfair. She should have told Robert Blakley to go to hell. Mags had been far better-looking than she’d ever known. With decent make-up and decent clothes she could have been quite striking in her way.

Cicily brushed her hair, glancing at her own face in her dressing-table looking-glass. No saleswoman had ever dared to patronize her; her beauty saw to that. It was all so wretchedly unfair.

Later that day Cosmo sat in the small room he called his study, its walls lined with old books. He had drawn the curtains and turned on the green-shaded desk light. In the kitchen Cicily was preparing their supper, cold ham and salad, and a vegetable soup to cheer it up. He’d passed the kitchen door and seen her at it, ‘Any Questions’ on the wireless. It was his fault; he knew it was; for twenty-seven years, ever since Mags had become part of the family, it had been his fault. He should have had the wisdom to know: he should have said over his dead body or something strong like that. ‘I don’t care who she is or how she’s suffered,’ he should have insisted, ‘she’s not going to come and live with us.’ But of course it hadn’t been like that, because Mags had just drifted into the family. Anyone would have thought him mad if he’d suggested that with the passing years she’d consume his marriage.

‘Cosmo. Supper.’

He called back, saying he was coming, already putting the moment off. He turned the desk light out but when he left his study he didn’t go directly to the kitchen. ‘I’m making up the fire,’ he announced from the sitting-room, pouring himself a glass of whisky and quickly drinking it.

‘Julia seemed well,’ Cicily said, pushing the wooden bowl of salad across the kitchen table at him.

‘Yes, she did.’ It was singular in a way, he thought, that he and Cicily should have taken to their hearts a person who was, physically, so very much the opposite of them. Mags had been like a cuckoo in the midst of the handsome family, and he wondered if she’d ever noticed it, if she’d ever said to herself that it was typical of her tendency to misfortune to find herself so dramatically shown up. He wanted to talk to Cicily about that. They had to talk about everything. They had to clear the air; certainly they had to agree that they were at a beginning, that they could not just go on.

‘I suppose it was her looks,’ he said, aware that he was putting it clumsily, ‘that in the end didn’t appeal to Robert Blakley. I mean, not as much as he’d imagined.’

‘Oh, he was a horrid man.’

‘No, but I mean, Cicily –’

‘I don’t want to talk about Robert Blakley.’

Neatly she arranged ham and salad on her fork. Any time she wanted to, he thought, she could pick up an affair. Men still found her as worth a second look as they always had: you could see it at cocktail parties and on trains, or even walking with her on the street. He felt proud of her, and glad that she hadn’t let herself go.

‘No, I meant she wasn’t much to look at ever,’ he said.

‘Poor Mags had far more than looks. Let’s not dwell on this, Cosmo.’

‘I think we have to, dear.’

‘She’s dead. Nothing we can say will bring her back.’

‘It’s not that kind of thing we have to talk about.’

‘She wanted her clothes to go to Oxfam. Except what she left to Mrs Forde. I’ll see to that tonight.’

When, seven years ago, Cosmo had had an affair with a girl in his office the guilt he might have felt had failed to come about. His unfaithfulness –the only occasion of it in his marriage – had not caused him remorse and heart-searching, as he’d expected it would. He did not return to Tudors after an afternoon with the girl to find himself wanting at once to confess to Cicily. Nor did he walk into a room and find Cicily seeming to be forlorn because she was being wronged and did not know it. He did not think of her, alone and even lonely, while he was with the girl. Such thoughts were unnecessary because Cicily was always all right, because there was always Mags. It had even occasionally seemed to him that she had Mags and he the girl.

Cosmo had never in any way objected to the presence of Mags in his house. She had made things easier all round, it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Even at the time of his office affair it had not occurred to him that her presence could possibly be designated as an error; and in all honesty she had never been a source of irritation to him. It was her death, her absence, that had brought the facts to light.

‘We have to talk, you know,’ he said, still eating ham and salad. ‘There are all sorts of things to come to terms with.’

‘Talk, Cosmo? What things? What do you mean?’

‘We could have made a mistake, you know, having Mags here all these years.’

She frowned. She shook her head, more in bewilderment than denial. He said, ‘I think we need to talk about it now.’

But Cicily wanted to be quiet. Immediately after supper she’d go through the clothes, arranging them for Oxfam, keeping back the things for Mrs Forde. She wanted to get it done as soon as possible. She remembered being in the sanatorium one time with Mags, both of them with measles. They’d talked for hours about what they’d like to do with their lives. She herself had at that time wanted to be a nurse. ‘I want to have babies,’ Mags had said. ‘I want to marry a decent kind of man and have a house in the country somewhere and bring up children.’

‘You see,’ Cosmo was saying, ‘there’ll be a certain adjustment.’

She nodded, not really listening. Half of Mags’s desire had come about: at least she’d lived in a house in the country and at least she’d brought up children, even if the children weren’t her own. There still was a school photograph, she and Mags and a girl called Evie Hopegood sitting in the sun outside the library. Just after it had been taken Miss Harper had come along and given Mags a row for sprawling in her chair.

‘Incidentally,’ Cicily said, ‘the man’s coming to mend that window-sash tomorrow.’

Cosmo didn’t reply. Perhaps this wasn’t the right moment to pursue the matter. Perhaps in a day or two, when she’d become more used to the empty house, he should try again.

They finished their meal. He helped her to wash up, something that hadn’t been necessary in the past. She went upstairs, he watched the television in the sitting-room.

Young men and girls were playing a game with tractor tyres. They were dressed in running shorts and singlets, one team’s red, the other’s yellow. Points were scored, a man with a pork-pie hat grimaced into the camera and announced the score. Another man breezed up, trailing a microphone. He placed an arm around the first man’s shoulders and said that things were really hotting up. Huge inflated ducks appeared, the beginning of another game. Cosmo turned the television off.

He poured himself another drink. He was aware that he wanted to be drunk, which was, in other circumstances, a condition he avoided. He knew that in a day or two the conversation he wished to have would be equally difficult. He’d go on trying to have it and every effort would fail. He drank steadily, walking up and down the long, low-ceiling sitting-room, glancing out into the garden, where dusk was already gathering. He turned the television on again and found the young men and girls playing a game with buckets of coloured water. He changed the channel. ‘I can’t help being a lotus-eater,’ a man was saying, while an elderly woman wept. Elsewhere Shipham’s paste was being promoted.

‘It’s no good putting it off,’ Cosmo said, standing in the doorway of the room that had been Mags’s. He had filled his glass almost to the brim and then had added a spurt of soda water. ‘We have to talk about our marriage, Cicily.’

She dropped a tweed skirt on to Mrs Forde’s pile on the floor. She frowned, thinking she must have misheard. It was unlike him to drink after supper, or indeed before. He’d brought a strong smell of alcohol into the room, which for some reason offended her.

‘Our marriage,’ he repeated.

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve been trying to say, Cicily. I want to talk about it. Now that Mags is dead.’

‘Whatever had poor Mags to do with it? And now that she is dead, how on earth –?’

‘Actually she consumed it.’

He knew he was not sober, but he knew as well that he was telling the truth. He had a feeling that had been trying to surface for days, which finally had succeeded in doing so while he was watching the athletes with the tractor tyres: deprived of a marriage herself, Mags had lived off theirs. Had she also, he wondered, avenged herself without knowing it?

These feelings about Mags had intensified since he’d been watching the television show, and it now seemed to Cosmo that everything had been turned inside out by her death. He wondered if James and Julia, looking back one day on their parents’ marriage, would agree that the presence of Mags in the house had been a mistake; he wondered if Cicily ever would.

‘Consumed?’ Cicily said. ‘I wasn’t aware –’

‘We were neither of us aware.’

‘I don’t know why you’re drinking whisky.’

‘Cicily, I want to tell you: I had an affair with a girl seven years ago.’

She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes unblinking. Then she puckered up her forehead, frowning again.

‘You never told me,’ she said, feeling the protest to be absurd as soon as she’d made it.

‘I have to tell you now, Cicily.’

She sat down on the bed that had been her friend’s. His voice went on speaking, saying something about Mags always being there, mentioning the Glenview Hotel for some reason, mentioning Robert Blakley and saying that Mags had probably intended no ill-will.

‘But you liked her,’ she whispered. ‘You liked her and what on earth had poor Mags –’

‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry, Cicily.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m sorry for being unfaithful.’

‘But how could I not know? How could you go off with someone else and I not notice anything?’

‘I think because Mags was here.’

She closed her eyes, not wanting to see him, in the doorway with his whisky. It didn’t make sense what he was saying. Mags was their friend; Mags had never in her life said a thing against him. It was unfair to bring Mags into it. It was ludicrous and silly, like trying to find an excuse.

‘The whole thing,’ he said, ‘from start to finish is all my fault. I shouldn’t have allowed Mags to be here, I should have known.’

She opened her eyes and looked across the room at him. He was standing exactly as he had been before, wretchedness in his face. ‘You’re making this up,’ she said, believing that he must be, believing that for some reason he’d been jealous of Mags all these years and now was trying to revenge himself by inventing a relationship with some girl. He was not the kind to go after girls; he wasn’t the kind to hurt people.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m making nothing up.’ The girl had wept when, in the end, he’d decreed that for her there was too little in it to justify their continuing the association. He’d felt about the girl the way he’d wanted to feel about being unfaithful to Cicily: guilty and ashamed and miserable.

‘I can’t believe it of you,’ Cicily whispered, weeping as the girl had wept. ‘I feel I’m in an awful nightmare.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My God, what use is saying you’re sorry? We had a perfectly good marriage, we were a happy family –’

‘My dear, I’m not denying that. All I’m saying –’

‘All you’re saying,’ she cried out bitterly, ‘is that none of it meant anything to you. Did you hate me? Did I repel you? Was she marvellous, this girl? Did she make you feel young again? My God, you hypocrite!’

She picked up from the bed a summer dress that had been Mags’s, a pattern of checks in several shades of blue. She twisted it between her hands, but Cosmo knew that the action was involuntary, that she was venting her misery on the first thing that came to hand.

‘It’s the usual thing,’ she said more quietly, ‘for men in middle age.’

‘Cicily –’

‘Girls are like prizes at a fun-fair. You shoot a row of ducks and there’s your girl with her child’s complexion still, and her rosebud lips and eager breasts –’

‘Please, Cicily –’

‘Why shouldn’t she have eager breasts, for God’s sake? At least don’t deny her her breasts or her milky throat, or her eyes that melted with love. Like a creature in a Sunday supplement, was she? Advertising vodka or tipped cigarettes, discovering herself with an older man. You fell in love with all that and you manage to blame a woman who’s dead. Why not blame yourself, Cosmo? Why not simply say you wanted a change?’

‘I do blame myself. I’ve told you I do.’

‘Why didn’t you marry your girl? Because James and Julia would have despised you? Because she wouldn’t have you?’

He didn’t reply, and a reply wasn’t really expected. She was right when she mentioned their children. He’d known at the time of the affair that they would have despised him for making what they’d have considered to be a fool of himself, going off with a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.

‘I want you to understand about Mags,’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to talk about, it’s all connected, Cicily. I should have felt sorry for you, but there was always you and Mags, chatting. I kept saying you were all right because you had Mags. I couldn’t help it, Cicily.’

‘Mags has nothing to do with it. Mags was always blamed by people, ill-used behind her back –’

‘I know. I’m sorry. It simply appears to be true, it’s hard to understand.’

She sobbed, seeming not to have heard him, still twisting the dress between her fingers. She whispered something but he couldn’t hear what it was. He said:

‘I’m telling you because I love you, Cicily. Because it can’t be between us.’

But even as he spoke he wasn’t certain that he still loved Cicily. There was something stale in their relationship, even a whiff of tedium. A happy ending would be that Cicily would find another man and he a girl as different from Cicily as the girl in his office had been. Why should they sit for the rest of their days in Tudors or the bar of the Glenview Hotel trying to make bricks without straw? What was the point, in middle age, of such a dreary effort?

In the room that had been Mags’s the weeping of Cicily grew louder and eventually she flung her head on to the pillow and pressed her face into its softness in an effort to stifle her sobs. He looked around at the familiar clothes – dresses and hats and skirts and blouses, pairs of shoes lined up on the floor. At this age happy endings with other people weren’t two a penny, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps they had the strength and the patience to blow life into a marriage with which they had lost touch. He shook his head, still standing by the door while Cicily wept. It was asking too much of her; how could she suddenly look back at every cut knee Mags had bandaged, every cake she’d baked, every word she’d spoken, and see them differently? How could she come to consider that Mags, an innocent predator, had got her own back simply by being in their house? Yet Cosmo knew that that was the truth. He and Cicily would try for a bit because they had no option, but the disruption that Mags’s modest presence had so meticulously denied would creep all through their marriage now, a victim’s legacy from her victim’s world.