The Collected Stories

‘Raymond, Raymond,’ cried the voice of Mrs Tamberley as Mrs Tamberley materialized suddenly beside them. ‘How’s Nanny Wilkinson?’

‘She died,’ murmured Raymond.

‘Of course she did,’ exclaimed Mrs Tamberley. ‘How silly of me!’

‘Oh no –’

‘You put that sweet notice in The Times. His old nurse,’ explained Mrs Tamberley to Mrs Fitch. ‘Poor Nanny Wilkinson,’ she said, and smiled and bustled off.

‘What was all that?’ asked Mrs Fitch.

‘It’s one of the things that happened to me during the year. The other was –’

‘What’s your name, anyway?’ the woman interrupted. ‘I don’t think I ever caught it.’

Raymond told her his name. He saw that she was wearing a black dress with touches of white on it. Her shoulders were bare and bony; she had, Raymond said to himself, an aquiline face.

‘The other thing was that an uncle died and left me a business in his will. That happened, actually, before the death of Nanny Wilkinson and to tell you the truth, Mrs Fitch, I just didn’t know what to do. “What could I do with a business?” I said to myself. So I made my way to Streatham where the old lady lived. “Run a business, Raymond? You couldn’t run a bath,” she said.’ Raymond laughed, and Mrs Fitch smiled frostily, looking about her for another drink. ‘It rankled, that, as you may imagine. Why couldn’t I run a business? I thought. And then, less than a week later, I heard that she had died in Streatham. I went to her funeral, and discovered that she’d left me a prayer- book in her will. All that happened in the last year. You see, Mrs Fitch?’

Mrs Fitch, her eyes on her husband, who was talking to a woman in yellow in a distant corner of the room, said vaguely:

‘What about the business?’

‘I sold the business. I live alone, Mrs Fitch, in a flat in Bayswater; I’m forty-two. I’m telling you that simply because I felt that I could never manage anything like taking on a business so suddenly. That’s what I thought when I had considered the matter carefully. No good being emotional, I said to myself.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch. She watched the woman move quite close to her husband and engage him in speech that had all the air of confidential talk. The woman wasn’t young, Mrs Fitch noticed, but had succeeded in giving the impression of youth. She was probably forty-four, she reckoned; she looked thirty.

So Mrs Tamberley had seen the notice in The Times, Raymond thought. He had worded it simply and had stated in a straightforward manner the service that Nanny Wilkinson had given over the years to his family. He had felt it her due, a notice in The Times, and there was of course only he who might do it. He remembered her sitting regally in his nursery teaching him his tidiness. Orderliness was the most important thing in life, she said, after a belief in the Almighty.

‘Get me a drink, dear,’ said Mrs Fitch suddenly, holding out an empty glass and causing Raymond to note that this woman was consuming the Tamberleys’ liquor at a faster rate than he.

‘Gin and vermouth,’ ordered Mrs Fitch. ‘Dry,’ she added. ‘Not that red stuff.’

Raymond smiled and took her glass, while Mrs Fitch observed that her husband was listening with rapt care to what the woman in yellow was saying to him. In the taxi-cab on the way to the Tamberleys’, he had remarked as usual that he was fatigued after his day’s work. ‘An early night,’ he had suggested. And now he was listening carefully to a female: he wouldn’t leave this party for another two hours at least.

‘It was quite a blow to me,’ said Raymond, handing Mrs Fitch a glass of gin and vermouth, ‘hearing that she was dead. Having known her, you see, all my life –’

‘Who’s dead now?’ asked Mrs Fitch, still watching her husband.

‘Sorry,’ said Raymond. ‘How silly of me! No, I meant, you see, this old lady whom I had known as Nanny Wilkinson. I was saying it was a blow to me when she died, although of course I didn’t see much of her these last few years. But the memories are there, if you see what I mean; and you cannot of course erase them.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch.

‘I was a particularly tall child, with my spectacles of course, and a longish upper lip. “When you’re a big man,” I remember her saying to me, “you’ll have to grow a little moustache to cover up all that lip.” And declare, Mrs Fitch, I did.’

‘I never had a nanny,’ said Mrs Fitch.

‘ “He’ll be a tennis-player,” people used to say – because of my height, you see. But in fact I turned out to be not much good on a tennis court.’

Mrs Fitch nodded. Raymond began to say something else, but Mrs Fitch, her eyes still fixed upon her husband, interrupted him. She said:

‘Interesting about your uncle’s business.’

‘I think I was right. I’ve thought of it often since, of sitting down in an office and ordering people to do this and that, instead of remaining quietly in my flat in Bayswater. I do all my own cooking, actually, and cleaning and washing up. Well, you can’t get people, you know. I couldn’t even get a simple char, Mrs Fitch, not for love nor money. Of course it’s easy having no coal fires to cope with: the flat is all-electric, which is what, really, I prefer.’

Raymond laughed nervously, having observed that Mrs Fitch was, for the first time since their conversation had commenced, observing him closely. She was looking into his face, at his nose and his moustache and his spectacles. Her eyes passed up to his forehead and down the line of his right cheek, down his neck until they arrived at Raymond’s Adam’s apple. He continued to speak to her, telling of the manner in which his flat in Bayswater was furnished, how he had visited the Sanderson showrooms in Berners Street to select materials for chair-covers and curtains. ‘She made them for me,’ said Raymond. ‘She was almost ninety then.’

‘What’s that?’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘Your nurse made them?’

‘I measured up for her and wrote everything down just as she had directed. Then I travelled out to Streatham