When we opened the door and went in she said in a whisper, ‘You’ll have to be quiet. My father is asleep.’ The room blossomed into largeness in the light and one’s first impression was of whiteness, white wallpaper and white paint. Above the mantelpiece there was a rectangular mirror with a flowery border. There were rooms leading off the one we were in and the whole flat seemed much more spacious than one might have expected.
She took off her coat and gloves and laid them on the table and sat down. The fire had gone out but there were still a few bits of charred wood remaining in it. A large dog got up and greeted her and then lay down in a corner munching a bone. A white-faced clock ticked on the mantelpiece.
‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked.
I said ‘Yes,’ and she went to the blue cooker and put the kettle on. She got out a tin of biscuits.
‘My father will be trying to listen,’ she said. ‘But he’s in the far end room. He doesn’t sleep very well. There’s no one to look after him but me. No one else. I have four sisters and they’re all married and they won’t look at him. Does one abandon him?’ She looked at me wearily and now that she had removed her red coat her face appeared more haggard and her throat more lined. ‘Or does one sacrifice oneself? He says to me, “Why did you never marry like your sisters and your brothers?” He taunts me with not marrying and yet he knows that if I married he would be left alone. Isn’t that queer? You’d think he wouldn’t say things like that, I mean in his own defence. You’d think he’d have more sense. But he doesn’t have any sense. He spends a lot of his time doing jigsaws. They never come out right of course. A bit of a castle or a boat, something like that, but most of the time he can’t be bothered finishing them. And another thing he does; he puts ships in bottles. He spends hours trying to get the sails inside with bits of string. He used to be a sailor you see. He’s been all over the world. But most of the time he cuts wood. He goes down to the shore and gathers wood and chops it up in the woodshed. He makes all sorts of useless ornaments. He’s got an axe. And lots of tools. In the summer he spends all his time in the shed chopping up wood. There’s a woodshed down below on the back lawn and in the summer there are leaves all round it. He sits there. But he’s always hacking away with that axe. Day after day. But what can one do with the old?’
She poured the hot water into the tea-pot and took it over to the table. She poured the tea into two large blue mugs and milked it.
‘It’s a problem, isn’t it, what to do with the old? If one wasn’t so good-hearted – some people aren’t like that at all. Do you take sugar? One? Some people can go away and forget. My sisters always make excuses for not having him. They say they haven’t got enough space with the children. Or they say they haven’t got enough money. Or they say he wouldn’t be good for the children. It’s funny how they can be so forgetful and yet he wasn’t any better to me than he was to them. In fact he treated me worse.’
She looked at me as if she expected me to say something. I murmured something unintelligible through the biscuit I was chewing, thinking that it all did sound really like a fairy tale. I wondered why she wore red. I had been reading something in one of the Sunday colour supplements about colour being a betrayal of one’s personality but then everything was a betrayal of one’s personality. Even conversation. I myself preferred blue but she wore red gloves, a red coat and she even had a red ribbon in her hair.
She was an odd mixture. At the dance she had danced very freely as they do in Top of the Pops, swaying like an unconscious flower, in a hypnotic trance of complete surrender to the body.
The dog crunched his bone in the corner and the clock ticked on.
‘I don’t understand why I’m so soft-hearted,’ she said, crushing a biscuit in her hand.
I looked at the TV set. ‘Is there anything on TV?’ I said, ‘or would that disturb your father?’
‘There’s a Radio Times there,’ she said carelessly. ‘If we shut the door he won’t hear it. I don’t watch it much.’ The set was of white wood and I had a vision of her father hacking it up for firewood with his trusty axe.
I found the Radio Times among a pile of romantic magazines, some of which lay open with rings of black ink round horoscopes.
‘There’s a series about Henry VIII,’ I said. ‘It’s been going on for a week or two. Have you seen any of it?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but if you want it. So long as it isn’t too loud.’
I switched on the TV and waited for the picture to declare itself. How did people exist before TV? What did they talk about? She rested her elbow on the table and drank her tea.
The picture clarified itself. It showed Anne Boleyn going to the scaffold. She was being prepared by her maids in attendance in the prison while the sunlight shone in straight shafts through the barred window. She told them
