Not tonight, Aunt Augusta, I pleaded. My fathers death is enough of a story for one day[203].
And she told it reasonably well, my aunt admitted, though I think that given her opportunity I would have told it a great deal better. But I warn you you will be sorry one day that you refused to let me tell you the story I proposed.
What story? I asked, thinking of my father.
The story of Charles Pottifer, of course, my aunt said.
Another time, Aunt Augusta.
You are wrong to be so confident in the existence of another time, my aunt replied and called for the bill so loudly that the dog barked back at her from the bar.
Chapter 19
My aunt did not return with me to England by the car-ferry as I thought she intended. She told me at breakfast that she was taking a train to Paris. There are things which I must settle, she said, and I remembered her warning of the night before and wondered quite wrongly as it turned out if she had a premonition of death.
Would you like me to go with you? I asked.
No, she said. From the way you spoke to me last night I think you have had enough of my company for a while.
Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer.
I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek.
I didnt mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta, I said.
You resemble your father more than your mother. He believed no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.
And my mother? I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue.
She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far[204].
Why didnt she marry him?
She hadnt the right disposition for a life in Highgate. Will you buy me a Figaro before you go?
When I came back from the bookstall she gave me the keys to her apartment. If I am away a long time, she said, I may want you to send me something or just to look in to see that all is well. I will write to the landlord and tell him you have the keys.
I returned to London on the car-ferry. Two days before, from the window of the train, I had watched a golden England spread beside the line now the picture was very different: England lay damp and cold, as grey as the graveyard, while the train lagged slowly from Dover Town towards Charing Cross under the drenching rain. One window could not be closed properly and a little pool of water collected at the side of the compartment; the heating had not been turned on. In the opposite corner a woman sneezed continuously while I tried to read the Daily Telegraph. There was a threatened engineering strike, and the car industry was menaced by a stoppage of cleaners in some key factory which turned out windscreen-wipers. Cars in all the BMC factories waited without wipers on the production line. Export figures were down and so was the pound.
I came at last beyond the court news to the obituaries, but there was little of interest to read in that column. Somebody called Sir Oswald Newman had died at the age of seventy-two; he was the star death in a poor programme. He had been chief arbitrator in a building dispute in the 1950s after retiring as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works. He had married Rosa Urquhart in 1928, by whom he had three sons, and she survived him. His eldest was now Secretary of the International Federation of Thermofactors and an OBE[205]. I thought of my father whispering, Dolly, my darling, before he died on the floor of the auberge[206] in the Haute Ville, too soon to meet Sir Oswald Newman during the building dispute, which would probably not have concerned him anyway. He always kept on good terms with his men so my mother had told me. Laziness and good nature often go together. There were always Christmas bonuses, and he was never in the mood to fight over the rise of a penny an hour. When I looked out of the window it was not Sir Oswald Newmans England I saw but my fathers grave in the smoky rain and Miss Paterson standing before it in prayer, and I envied him his inexplicable quality of drawing womens love. Had Rosa Newman so loved Sir Oswald and her son, the OBE?
I let myself into the house. I had been away two nights, but like a possessive woman it had the histrionic air of being abandoned. Dust collected quickly in autumn even with the windows closed. I knew the routine that I would certainly follow: a telephone call to Chicken, a visit to the dahlias if the rain stopped. Perhaps Major Charge might address a remark to me over the hedge. Dolly, my darling, my father whispered, dying in the small hotel, as I lay in the Highgate nursery with a nightlight beside the bed to drive away the fears which always gathered after my mother or was it my stepmother? had pecked me good night. I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper[207], when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.
A month passed, and no news came to me from my aunt. I rang several times, but there was never any reply. I tried to interest myself in a novel of Thackerays, but it lacked the immediacy of my aunts stories. As she had foreseen, I even regretted having prevented her telling me the story of Charles Pottifer. I found myself living now, when I lay awake or waited in the kitchen for the kettle to boil, or when I let The Newcomes fall shut on my lap, with memories of Curran, Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr. Visconti. They peopled my loneliness. When six weeks went by without news I became anxious, in case, like my father, she had died in a foreign land. I even telephoned to the Saint James and Albany it was the first time since I left the bank that I had telephoned abroad. I was nervous of my poor French when I spoke into a receiver, as though the errors might be magnified by the microphone. The receptionist told me that my aunt was no longer there she had left three weeks before for Cherbourg.