I for Isobel Read online

  ‘Is that all right? Can I go now?’

  ‘Oh, if you call that polished. Do what you like. Selfish. You’re all tarred with the same brush.’ She was too listless for anger.

  The girls happened to arrive home together one afternoon to find Aunt Noelene’s car parked outside. They brightened. Though Aunt Noelene was an awkward, shaming character, her visit meant a present of ten shillings and her cast-off clothes, which were better than other people’s new ones.

  Mr Callaghan’s two sisters had done well in the world—an injustice which annoyed Mrs Callaghan so much that Isobel used to tell the children at the convent stories about a will suppressed or even forged to cheat her father of his inheritance, but she had come to understand at last that her mother was angry with fate, as usual. Aunt Yvonne had married a property owner and lived in the country, as far away as Heaven. Aunt Noelene was the manageress of a dress factory and owned shares, had a car, took smart holidays and wore clothes that filled Mrs Callaghan with contemptuous pity.

  ‘Poor Noelene. If she knew what a fool she looked in that get-up.’

  The two women were sitting at the kitchen table, Mrs Callaghan calm and social, looking cheerful for the first time since Margaret’s desertion, sipping tea from one of the good cups and making a tasty meal of Aunt Noelene in mauve crepe de Chine with two sleek russet foxes round her shoulders, each biting the other’s thigh, their tails swinging free. The shaming thing about Aunt Noelene was that, though she was quite ugly, she dressed as if she was beautiful. Isobel didn’t see why she shouldn’t—why should the beauties have all the mauve crepe de Chine?—but Aunt Noelene, having let her dreams show, lacked the nerve to defend them. Under Mrs Callaghan’s amused eye she cowered, burning with helpless rage, and even the foxes looked troubled.

  Her voice too was harsh and sullen. ‘Well, how are you two getting on at school?’

  ‘They are both doing very well, thank you. Would you like another cup of tea?’

  There was a bulky brown-paper parcel propped on a chair.

  ‘No thanks, May.’ Aunt Noelene made an effort. ‘Isn’t Margaret shooting up? Getting more like Yvonne, isn’t she?’

  Mrs Callaghan dimmed a little at the mention of Yvonne. ‘How is Yvonne? I haven’t seen her since Rob’s funeral.’

  ‘I was up there for a week at Easter. They’re all very well. Keith is helping Tom with the property full-time now, he wasn’t interested in going to University. Hugh wants to do Law, he’s the one with the brains. It’s lucky one of them wants to go on the land.’

  ‘It must be very nice, having a holiday in the country. I know poor Rob would have enjoyed it if he had had the chance.’

  Disaster was coming. Margaret gave an anxious look at the parcel and Isobel shared her feeling. There was the ten shillings too.

  Aunt Noelene stared at the table.

  ‘When the doctor said that a change of air might work wonders, I wrote to her. Her only brother dying and she sent me five pounds. Towards a holiday. Five pounds.’

  Aunt Noelene muttered, ‘So I suppose you sent it back.’

  Looking quietly contemptuous, Mrs Callaghan poured herself another cup of tea, steadily.

  Well, there went ten shillings. She was going to regret it as much as the girls, but they both knew she couldn’t give up her present enjoyment for its sake.

  ‘For God’s sake, May, why do you keep going over and over it? We’ve heard it all before. It’s over and done with. Forget it.’

  ‘There are things you’d like forgotten, too, I suppose. Like not going to visit your only brother when he was dying in hospital.’

  ‘If I’d been allowed to know how sick he was…’ Aunt Noelene was shouting now.

  ‘Allowed to know. Didn’t want to know. You and Yvonne have never wanted to know anything that didn’t suit you.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten a thing or two, too. You haven’t always been an angel.’

  Mrs Callaghan breathed deeply. ‘I want to know what you mean by that.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well?’

  Aunt Noelene could not answer. Shakily, she searched in her handbag, got out two ten-shilling notes and put them on the table.

  ‘For the girls.’

  The girls held their breath. Was she going to say, ‘Take your money!’?

  No. Aunt Noelene had gone, the money was on the table, the parcel still on the chair.

  Their mother sat staring into space. They did not dare to mention the parcel yet.

  At last, since she didn’t stir, Margaret said, ‘Can we look at the clothes?’

  ‘Do what you like.’

  They opened it quietly, subduing enthusiasm. A navy skirt, a white silk blouse, a red jumper, a yellow dress…

  It was made of buttercup-yellow linen, the yoke and the sleeves embroidered in white cutwork to a heavy lace.

  Margaret said ‘Oh!’ and held it up. Pinned to the skirt was a sheet of paper with ISOBEL printed in large letters. Margaret said ‘Oh!’ in a different tone. Mrs Callaghan uttered a scream of anger, as if Aunt Noelene had left her an insulting message.

  Isobel knew at once what she had to do: give up, sacrifice. It was harder than she had foreseen.

  ‘You can have it if you like.’

  She was glad that the words were out and couldn’t be taken back.

  ‘Do you mean it? Really?’

  ‘Yes. You can have it.’ Don’t make me say it again.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said their mother softly. ‘No. It’s Isobel’s dress and she’s going to wear it.’ She got up, saying to herself, ‘That creature! That creature!’ and walked out, holding her hands to her head.

  The girls looked at each other, puzzled.

  ‘You did mean it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Go on, try it on.’

  Isobel was sure now. The state of grace, the peace and security of it, meant more than any dress.

  She followed Margaret into the bedroom and helped her into the dress.

  ‘It looks lovely.’ So it did, and she didn’t mind at all.

  ‘Oh, Isobel!’ Margaret hugged her briefly.

  ‘Take that dress off, Margaret,’ said their mother from the doorway. ‘It belongs to Isobel.’

  ‘But Isobel said I could have it.’

  Isobel said, ‘Aunt Noelene will never know.’

  Her mother gave her a look of hate as she walked towards Margaret, who did not know what was happening and stood like a good little girl having a dress fitted till she heard the dull snap of threads and the tearing noise. She cried out then as if she had been hit.

  ‘Damn you,’ screamed Isobel. ‘Damn you, damn you, it was mine. It wasn’t yours to tear. It was mine and I gave it to Margaret. Damn you!’

  She saw the look of peace and relief on her mother’s face as she walked away and she knew what she had done. The old sick closeness was back and she was the same old Isobel.

  Margaret was sitting on her bed dressed in her slip, stroking the torn yoke and sobbing.

  ‘It’s only a dress,’ said Isobel. She had lost more.

  ‘Oh, you shut up. You didn’t want it, anyhow.’

  It wasn’t only a dress. It was much more, and it was gone, and so was the state of grace.

  At that moment, Isobel thought such things were not for either of them.

  4 • GLASSWARE AND OTHER BREAKABLE ITEMS

  In the kitchen, Aunt Yvonne and Aunt Noelene were talking about clothes for the funeral.

  ‘Of course they have to wear black,’ said Aunt Yvonne. ‘At their mother’s funeral! I don’t know what you can be thinking of.’

  ‘The money.’ Aunt Noelene’s voice was rougher, and always had a defiant note in it. ‘I’m thinking about the money. They haven’t got much, poor kids. I don’t mind buying them clothes but I think black’s a waste of money at their age.’

  ‘At their mother’s funeral!’

  It was interesting that Aunt Yvonne had the finer sentiments, but Aunt Noelene was going to
pay for the clothes.

  Isobel was packing most of her books into a box to be stored at Aunt Noelene’s, and was feeling her first chill of sorrow at being parted from them. She hoped Aunt Yvonne would win the argument, for it was reassuring that grief had its uniform and its routine—she could join the army and become anonymous.

  ‘All right. Have it your way. I’ll take them into Graces’ this afternoon. And a pair of shoes for Isobel. I’ve never seen…’ her voice dwindled and was lost.

  Aunt Yvonne answered, ‘They’re lucky to have had a good education.’

  Dead, thought Isobel, trying the word again. It still meant only silenced. There was no hope of calling up any decent feeling from her evil heart, which was rejoicing in the prospect of freedom and even of new shoes. She picked up Shakespeare, Byron, Keats and Shelley and carried them into the bedroom, where Margaret was sitting on her bed, dazed and weeping, silently and slowly, tears dripping like blood from a cut finger.

  ‘Do you mind if I take the Shakespeare? It isn’t mine but I’d like to have it.’

  Margaret shook her head, sending two tears running quickly down her cheeks. It wouldn’t do to tell her to cheer up. Somebody should be giving Isobel the opposite advice.

  Yet there was in her, deeper than her relief, a paralysing sorrow, not at her mother’s death but at being unable to grieve at it. That one was going to stay with her; she looked for distraction from it in the cheerful business of packing and buying new shoes, but knew that any cheerfulness was, in the situation, shocking. She feared she had shocked Aunt Yvonne already.

  Perhaps the funeral would touch her feeling and make her a member of the human race.

  ‘I heard Aunt Yvonne talking to Aunt Noelene in the kitchen. I think we’re going to buy dresses for the funeral this afternoon.’

  At that, Margaret began to sob, lay down and hugged the pillow to her face, crying, ‘Poor Mum. Poor Mum.’

  Oh, why couldn’t she do that?

  It was no better at the funeral. All that Isobel could think, of the coffin and the candles, the hymns and the praise, the relatives who never visited while her mother was alive, but came now with serious faces to the church and the grave, was that her mother had become like other people at last.

  As they lowered the coffin into the ground, she told herself urgently, ‘Feel something, feel something!’ for this was her last chance, but she could only see her joy flaring like a great red flower among the pallid chrysanthemums.

  Ritual had failed her. That depressed her so much that she became respectable and, in the car on the way back to the house, earned a kind glance from Aunt Yvonne, who looked up from comforting Margaret to see her dejected air and to misinterpret it.

  ‘Now,’ said Aunt Yvonne, as they sat drinking a cup of tea in the kitchen, ‘we have to think what’s to be done. I’d like to take the girls back with me for a while, to have a holiday and get over the shock.’

  ‘I’ve got the chance of a job,’ said Isobel quickly. ‘I have to go for an interview tomorrow.’

  Aunt Noelene said, ‘But you haven’t started at Tech.’

  ‘They’ll take me without shorthand and typing because I got honours in German. They want somebody to translate the German mail.’

  ‘Well,’ Aunt Yvonne uttered an inscrutable sigh, ‘perhaps that would be the best thing.’

  ‘Make sure you get your shorthand and typing,’ said Aunt Noelene, frowning.

  ‘Where is she going to live?’ asked Aunt Yvonne, looking steadily at Aunt Noelene.

  Isobel held her breath, but Aunt Noelene preserved a beneficent silence.

  ‘I can get board somewhere.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Aunt Yvonne rubbed her temples, wearily. ‘I’ll see to that before we go. And then there’s the furniture.’

  ‘What about Margaret’s job?’ Aunt Noelene sounded aggressive.

  ‘It’s not much of a job, is it? I don’t see that it matters if she does give it up. She can do better than that.’

  ‘If you think so.’ They understood now that Margaret would not come back. ‘The girls can pick out any bits of furniture they want to keep and I’ll store them at home. We can get a dealer in to take the rest and be done with it.’

  Isobel wept her first tears and wiped them away in surprise. She thought hard for something to ask for, to keep, but, except for her books, which hardly counted, she could find nothing. That dried her tears and deepened her depression.

  Aunt Yvonne said, ‘I might as well look through the sheets and towels and the crockery.’ She sounded astonishingly refreshed by the thought. ‘They’re things you can always use.’

  The girls were shamed, not by Aunt Yvonne, but by the poverty she was about to uncover. Aunt Noelene looked with quick deep contempt at Aunt Yvonne; Isobel caught the look and stored it away, as she did everything that reached her from the world outside.

  Margaret and Aunt Yvonne sat together on the back seat of the taxi, as like as mother and daughter. It was agreed now that Margaret would make her home with Aunt Yvonne; she wore the dreaming look of one who has just received a declaration of love. Isobel sat beside the driver.

  They were on their way to the boarding house the aunts had found for her, a respectable establishment where she would find young company, then to the railway station where Aunt Yvonne and Margaret would begin their journey home.

  ‘Number a hundred and five,’ said Aunt Yvonne to the driver. He slowed down while they peered at house numbers, Isobel breathing quickly in excitement. ‘Here we are.’

  The taxi stopped in front of a large two-storeyed house of red brick with bay windows which glared at a small ragged lawn.

  She got out. The driver got her case from the boot and set it beside her on the pavement.

  ‘Well,’ said Aunt Yvonne.

  There was a moment of blankness. Something was expected; neither girl knew what it was. They looked awkwardly at each other. Aunt Yvonne looked disconcerted. Isobel had seen that expression on other faces. She had never been able to interpret it.

  ‘Well,’ said Aunt Yvonne very brightly, ‘don’t forget your board is paid till Sunday week. You have the receipt, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Yvonne.’ She added, ‘Thank you,’ though she thought it most likely that Aunt Noelene had paid her board. Still, the word filled a gap.

  ‘Noelene will be in touch about the money for the furniture. Don’t forget we expect you at Christmas.’

  Isobel nodded.

  Margaret leaned forward.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  It wasn’t a last word. It was a first word. She picked up her suitcase, walked to the front door and rang the bell.

  Here we go.

  The door was opened by a tall elderly woman, ruddy-faced and ginger-haired, who must be Mrs Bowers, the landlady.

  ‘It’s Isobel, is it?’

  Time had carved a sourly humorous expression on her face and her voice matched it in harshness, but her words were welcoming.

  ‘Come on in. We’ve been expecting you. Leave your case in the hall. I’ve just made a cup of tea. Your room’s upstairs, first on the right with the door open. You’ll find it all right, I don’t take the stairs on account of my legs. Come and have a cup of tea before you go up.’

  Isobel followed her along the hall into a large bright kitchen, where an old woman sat at the table slicing beans, or, it seemed, resting from slicing beans, while she stared with vague salt-water blue eyes into the distance. She was a real confection, the old woman, large and so soft she seemed to be made of whipped cream, and topped with a floss of silver hair.

  ‘This is my friend, Mrs Prendergast. This is Isobel; she’s taking Rosemary’s room, you know. Lost her mother, poor little thing,’ she added surprisingly.

  Isobel was wearing her funeral clothes. Aunt Noelene had settled on a black skirt, which would be useful later, and a black blouse with white pin spots, in defiance of Aunt Yvonne. Isobel hadn’t been quite aware till M
rs Bowers spoke that she was wearing mourning. She hadn’t, after all, much choice.

  Mrs Prendergast returned from the distance and focused her eyes. ‘Sudden, was it? What was it? Her heart?’

  Mrs Bowers said sharply, ‘She wouldn’t want to be talking about that. Now sit down. How do you like your tea?’

  ‘No milk, thank you.’

  From shyness her voice almost failed her, but this was acceptable in a poor orphan. She was able to drink her tea and eat a slice of cake in silence while the two women chatted.

  ‘Thank you very much.’ She set down her cup and stood up.

  ‘Dinner’s at half past six. The dining room’s next door, through the hatch there. The bathroom’s at the end of the passage upstairs. Change your linen Sunday morning. Madge will show you round. That’s my daughter, Madge,’ she added stoically.

  Mrs Prendergast answered her tone, with sympathy.

  ‘Still in with those people?’

  Mrs Bowers shrugged. ‘Doesn’t do any harm, I suppose.’

  Isobel wondered, as she carried her case upstairs, who the people were who caused concern in Mrs Prendergast and humorous resignation in Mrs Bowers. It appeared at least that Madge was flighty. What they called a mod, perhaps. Then she found the open door at the top of the stairs, went into her room and closed the door behind her. It was a commonplace little room but she was prepared to love everything in it: bed (slightly sagging), chair (straight), faded floral curtains at the window (her own window), combination wardrobe and dressing-table (lucky she didn’t have many clothes), a grate in the corner, with a vase of paper flowers delivering the message that it was no longer used for fires, above it a shelf for her books. She unpacked them first: Keats, Shelley, Byron, Shakespeare, The Last Chronicle of Barset, from the library. She looked with regret at that. She had been reading the novels of Trollope and whenever she wasn’t reading, no matter what was happening in the outside world, she was conscious of being in exile from Barsetshire. She resisted temptation and went on with her unpacking, having a modest ambition to meet life, to be adequate. She had an idea of a life of her own, like the room of her own, where she chose the furniture—no rages, no black passions, no buffeting from the world. She opened her suitcase and took out the box containing the new alarm clock, symbol of the new adequacy, wound it, set it down on the dressing table and began to laugh, because she did not know, not within an hour, what time it was, which marred the symbolic gesture or made it more symbolic still.