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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
An enchanting comedy of manners of old age, set in an old people's home in the heart of the English countryside.
Das E-Book Summer at the Haven wird angeboten von Allison & Busby und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Enchanting, comedy, old people's home, English countryside
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Seitenzahl: 243
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Summer at the Haven
Katharine Moore
To Josephine Fry
Contents
SUMMER AT THE HAVEN
1
THE HAVEN
THE HAVEN, a private Home for elderly ladies, was by now not unlike its inmates, but it had originally been the proud achievement of a prosperous Victorian merchant who had pulled down the old Tudor farmhouse, once a Manor, and erected on its site a handsome structure in the fashionable pseudo-Gothic style with a side turret and stained-glass windows over the porch and on the stairs and even in the proud bathroom. His sons had been killed in the 1914 war, the family had faded out and the house, untenanted throughout the Second World War, had at length been sold off cheaply to be converted for its present purpose. It was thoroughly unsuitable for this, being just too far away from the large village of Darnley for convenience or company. Its rooms were big and had to be divided, which made them disproportionately lofty and a queer shape, and the menace of worn floors and windows and roof tiles was always present to the harassed house committee. It was also too secluded to attract domestic staff and there was not enough money available to tempt them by high wages.
The house made a brave effort, however, though this was never enough to achieve an all-over effect. Some sections peeled obviously away while others showed a distinct facelift and, where once there had been an elegant conservatory, a square annexe containing the offices, which looked rather as if it were constructed of cardboard. had been painted a bright pink.
The Victorian merchant had found nothing much in the way of a garden. There were a few old fruit trees growing out of a rough grass space ending in an ancient ditch, on the other side of which was a little copse of oak, ash and thorn. He had laid out a lawn and flowerbeds and, though he had left the old trees, he had planted near the house a monkey-puzzle and a deodar which had grown to fine proportions. As with the house, there was now a struggle to keep the most visible and utilitarian part of the garden trim and flourishing. The narrow beds each side of the gravel sweep were filled with neat bedding plants, begonias and geraniums in the summer, chrysanthemums and dahlias in the autumn. Spring bulbs were not encouraged because they were untidy. In fact, all the cultivated parts of the garden were rather like the shelves of a self-service store with rows of the same sort of goods kept orderly and separate. At the back of the house, a short strip of the old lawn was regularly mown and there were two beds of floribunda roses, one pink and one red. There was a small trimmed shrubbery of privet, laurel and lilac and, in a discreet corner, ranks of vegetables. Only under one window, was a plot where well tended but not very tidy flowers were happily mixed up together like the goods in an old-fashioned village shop.
The Haven, when full, could accommodate eight old ladies. Each had their own room containing their remnants of furniture, china and pictures. It also housed the warden and whatever resident staff that could be scraped together.
Mrs Thornton’s room was the larger of the two attics. It had originally held three narrow iron bedsteads in which had slept a parlour maid, a housemaid and an underhouse-maid. The smaller attic had been the cook’s and was now used as a boxroom. Mrs Thornton had chosen her room because she did not like the sound of people tramping above her and because, as the other attic was empty, she felt an assurance of comparative privacy. The shape of the room, too, appealed to her – the interior of the absurd turret opened out of one corner – this had been where the parlour maid had slept, thus claiming her superiority over the other two maids, and Mrs Thornton in her turn had thought it very convenient for her own bed, which was the one on which her son had been born. From the little turret window she could see the railway line and the trains, now, alas, much depleted in number, that connected the branch station with the main line, seemed to her like a link with the outer world. The other window looked on to the front drive, used by whoever called in from this outer world. So, although the lift stopped short of the attic floor and it was cold there in winter and hot in summer and the sloping ceilings allowed little wallspace, she felt the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.
Besides her bed, she had brought with her her mother’s rocking-chair and her husband’s bureau, the gate-legged table they had bought together when furnishing their first home, and as many books as she could find room for. All these articles were thickly encrusted with memories. On the whole, if no longer happy, she was content. When tempted to indulge in melancholy she would take herself in hand and at such times she would hear the voice of her Scotch nanny quite clearly, as though she were in the room: “Count your blessings, Miss Milly.” It was her favourite maxim and perhaps next came: “Eat up everything on your plate, now. I canna have a faddy bairn in my nursery. There’s many a poor callant would be glad to have what you are wanting to leave each day.” At the time, when suffering from some childish grief or lacking appetite – for she was a delicate little girl – Nanny seemed not only unsympathetic but stupid. Any other blessing but the one denied her then and there seemed quie unreal, and as for the unwanted dinner, how she wished the poor child would come and take it away from her. But in old age and at The Haven, while more profound advice was forgotten, Nanny’s precepts remained and stood her in good stead both at the rather unappetizing meal times and in moods of dejection.
One wet cold May morning, then, she began deliberately to count her blessings. She was not deaf like old Miss Brown, only a little hard of hearing; she was not going blind like old Miss Norton, only with gently failing sight; she was not crippled and wracked with arthritis like old Miss Dawson, only troubled at night by one hip and one knee; she was not bald like old Miss Ford underneath her wig, only going a little thin around the temples; she was not asthmatical and bronchial like old Mrs Perry; above all, unlike poor dear old Mrs Langley, she was still in her right mind; only proper names eluded her in a stupidly arbitrary manner. It was strange, she realized suddenly, that she was thinking of everybody as old when she herself was as old, or in some cases, even older than they. She must try to remember this. One other blessing occurred to her – her heart was not all that strong, unlikely, as in some cases she knew, to outlast the rest of her. She gave it all the work she could, walking up and down to her attic, for instance, disdaining the help of the lift for the first two floors.
She had got thus far in practising Nanny’s maxim that morning when she was disturbed by a voice, not altogether unlike Nanny’s own in tone, and when she was not at her best either. It was the voice of Miss Blackett, the warden, from the landing below.
“Mrs Langley, whatever are you doing?”
A foolish little laugh in reply floated up through Mrs Thornton’s half-open door and then she heard another door firmly shut and Miss Blackett’s steps ascending the stairs. The warden could only be called a mixed blessing and Mrs Thornton braced herself for the encounter. Hardly waiting to knock, Miss Blackett marched into the room.
“Mrs Thornton, I wonder that with your door ajar you didn’t hear Mrs Langley wandering about. I have just found her playing absolute havoc with the linen cupboard – sheets and towels all over the floor and herself actually standing on a pile of blankets trying to reach the upper shelves; and when I asked her what she was up to she said she was looking for her baby’s clothes and that her husband was coming this afternoon to fetch them both. She thinks that this is a maternity home and that she’s just had a child. She shouldn’t really be here now and I don’t think we can keep her any longer. She must go into the geriatric ward at the hospital.”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Mrs Thornton, “surely not, Miss Blackett. She is so happy and she never does any real harm, it is only that she doesn’t live in the present any more. She believes her husband and her friends she has loved in the past come to see her every day – she never stops believing it and so of course they do.”
Miss Blackett stared at her blankly and Mrs Thornton swore inwardly. Would she never learn not to make remarks like that to people like Miss Blackett? No, she supposed at her age she never would. It would almost certainly make it worse now if she went on, but go on of course she did.
‘If she goes into a geriatric ward she will be treated like an invalid and she’ll have to leave everything behind, all her things, I mean, and then she may wake up, you see.”
“Well, wouldn’t that be desirable,” said Miss Blackett crossly, “though I fear it isn’t at all likely, senility never regresses – and as to her things, she has far too many of them and she never dusts them.”
Residents at The Haven, if able-bodied, were expected to do their own dusting. It gave them something to do and relieved the domestic situation just a little.
“She says that Susan, her housemaid, who has been with the family for years, sees to all that whenever I mention it,” went on Miss Blackett, adding with a rare touch of humour: “I only wish I could lay my hands on that Susan.”
Immediately Mrs Thornton felt herself thaw and she noticed for the first time, too, how tired the warden looked and that she was leaning against the door as she talked.
“Isn’t Brenda due back tomorrow?” she asked. Brenda was the latest living-in help and away for a week’s holiday.
“She isn’t coming back at all,” said Miss Blackett. “She phoned last night that she’s taken a job in a shop – too quiet here, she says. She didn’t even have the decency to give in her notice.”
Mrs Thornton looked distressed, she and the warden both belonged to the generation that expected a month’s notice and could not easily accept modern casualness.
“Oh, dear, that leaves only Gisela and Mrs Mills,” she said. Gisela was the au pair from Germany who was a recent arrival. Miss Blackett did most of the cooking herself. She was an adequate but not a good cook, not being interested in food. Mrs Mills, the gardener’s wife, came in to do cleaning.
“Yes,” sighed Miss Blackett, “I shall have to let the committee know and try advertising again, I suppose”.
“I’ll do Mrs Langley’s dusting,” said Mrs Thornton.
Miss Blackett merely sniffed in response, recalling Mrs Thornton’s remarks about Mrs Langley with irritation. She had thought Mrs Thornton had more sense, but they were none of them to be relied on. She turned and went downstairs. Why ever Mrs Thornton chose to stay on in that attic when there was now a good room available on the second floor, she failed to understand. If she moved down the attic floor could be left to take care of itself, which would save a good deal more work than doing the dusting for Mrs Langley, who ought not to be here any longer anyway. But none of them thought of anyone but themselves. The old were so self-centred.
After lunch and resting time were over, Mrs Thornton knocked on Mrs Langley’s door. She had thought out her plan of action carefully and marched in flaunting her duster about and talking rather loudly and quickly.
“I know it is Susan’s day out, Mrs Langley, and I wondered, as you are sure to be having visitors for tea, whether you would like me just to go over your lovely china so as to have everything looking just as it would if Susan were here.”
Mrs Langley, who was in her nineties, was sitting by what should have been the fireplace but was now only a cold radiator, for the heating was turned off, it being May by the calendar though nearer November in temperature. She was a pretty old lady with large faded blue eyes and white curls done up with a narrow green velvet ribbon on the top of her head. Her face was singularly smooth and unlined. She was wrapped in a none too clean little grey shawl and Mrs Thornton’s heart smote her as she saw it.
“Dear Jessie,” said Mrs Langley, “how very kind.”
She always called Mrs Thornton Jessie, but who Jessie really was she had never discovered. She preferred it, however, to her own name, for Milly, rhyming inexorably with silly, filly and frilly, had been unfortunate for her in her schooldays.
“I am expecting the vicar,” went on Mrs Langley. “He said he’d come about the christening – not that he’s likely to notice a little dust, gentleman don’t, do they – but it’s well, perhaps, to be on the safe side.”
The lovely Chelsea shepherdess on the mantelpiece had the same slightly neglected, soiled look as her owner, but Mrs Thornton soon put her to rights and her attendant shepherd, too. Between them was a row of enchanting tiny china houses and a Dresden flower piece. But Miss Blackett was right, the room was really too cluttered up with ornaments and furniture, and all the wallspace was completely covered with photographs in dark oak frames and pale watercolours in gilt ones. There were far too many chairs and small tables and they none of them seemed to know what they were doing or where they were meant to be. Yet Mrs Thornton was sure that everything in her room was significant and precious to Mrs Langley. She dusted them as carefully and quickly as she could and finished just as Gisela, the German girl, appeared with tea – a brown teapot, a plastic cup and a plate upon which were two slices of bread and butter and a dull little cake.
Mrs Langley clicked in disapproval. “Would you mind getting out the Worcester cups from my corner cupboard? My husband will be here directly, I always hear the carriage at about this time.” She seemed to have forgotten the vicar by now. “My husband likes to drive himself, you know, though he brings James with him to hold Bessie and Brownie while he is here, such a dear fine pair they are.”
Mrs Thornton found the cups and placed them on the tea tray where they looked sadly out of place. Such as the happy expectation in Mrs Langley’s voice that she caught herself listening for horses and carriage wheels as she went upstairs to her own room. She did not hear them but she knew that Mrs Langley would.
Meanwhile Miss Blackett was having her own welcome cup in her office sitting-room and making notes in preparation for the house committee meeting on the following day. These were held only quarterly unless a crisis arose needing immediate attention. On the whole, Miss Blackett enjoyed them. She was listened to with respectful attention when she gave her report, for the committee knew she would be difficult to replace.
“Granted that Miss Blackett is not the ideal warden,” said the chairwoman, Lady Merivale, to her secretary, “but she is conscientious and hard-working and she is also cheap, which, I need hardly say, is a sad but inevitable necessity in these times.” The secretary had been hinting that Miss Blackett seemed sometimes to lack sensitivity.
She had been a matron in a boys’ preparatory school for some years but had then thought that old ladies might be easier to manage. She found she was mistaken. You generally knew where you were with small boys, but with “them”, as she always thought of the old ladies, you never knew – they were so unreliable. “Unreliable” was her favourite term of disapproval. She bore “them” a grudge for the mistake she had made but she did not feel like another change.
Miss Blackett’s room was the extreme opposite of Mrs Langley’s. It was spotless and very neat, her papers stacked in tidy piles on her desk, on the top of which stood the one picture in the room, a small faded photograph of a kitten. Miss Blackett sat at her desk and wrote:
(1) Mrs Langley, to be removed to the geriatric unit of the hospital as soon as possible.
(2) The deodar tree to be cut down. It makes Miss Dawson’s room very dark and also damp, as it is far too near the house and in wet weather its branches drip down the walls.
(3) Report on Brenda’s leaving and discuss replacement.
(4) Report on repairs to gutters and bathroom pipe and request for repainting of front ground-floor window frames and needful repair of old stable door and lock.
As she finished the last note, a large ginger cat rattled imperiously at the door and was immediately let in. He sat down at once on the top of Miss Blackett’s papers. She sighed resignedly and stroked him. This was Lord Jim, so christened by a Mrs Wilson, a late resident, the widow of a naval officer, who had read nothing but Conrad’s novels and made his wife read them too. Miss Blackett knew nothing of Conrad and thought the name a compliment to her cat’s proud manners. She was therefore pleased with the name. Everyone knew that Lord Jim could do no wrong in her eyes and everyone thought her one photograph was of him, but in this they were wrong. It was of her only childhood’s pet, passionately loved but put to sleep when he reached maturity because the aunt who had brought her up said he ruined the furniture and harboured fleas. Miss Blackett could not believe that Lord Jim was not a privilege and pleasure for all the old ladies and good for them, too. This happened to be true as regards Mrs Thornton, Miss Norton and Miss Brown, but quite untrue of Miss Dawson and Mrs Perry. Mrs Perry’s passion was flowers and she it was who lovingly tended that herbaceous border beneath her window. Unfortunately Lord Jim’s favourite daybed was precisely on this plot. It was sunny and sheltered from cold winds and he enjoyed both sleeping there and trying to catch the butterflies that hovered over the lavender and pinks and buddleia.
“Lord Jim does love your little garden, Mrs Perry,” said Miss Blackett approvingly. “He’s made quite a nest for himself so cleverly there, do you see?’
Poor Mrs Perry did indeed see, but she said nothing for she knew the situation was hopeless both from Miss Blackett’s point of view and Lord Jim’s. As for Miss Dawson, her passion was for birds and ever since Lord Jim, with that inspired tactlessness not seldom to be observed in cats, had laid a dead thrush at the door of her room, there had been a bitter one-sided feud between her and the warden – one-sided because Miss Blackett was quite unaware of it. Even had she seen the thrush, she would have considered it a signal sign of regard for Miss Dawson on Lord Jim’s part for which she should have felt gratitude. Birds, after all, were designed by Nature among their other uses to provide healthy amusement for cats.
Unfortunately the thrush was not an isolated casualty and with each pathetic little corpse, whether laid at her door or found elsewhere, poor Miss Dawson suffered anew and raged inwardly.
2
MISS DAWSON AND MRS PERRY
MISS DAWSON’S room on the second floor was always in a green gloom. Very close to the window were the boughs of the deodar tree. This tree was a perpetual joy to her, not only in itself, its alien mysterious world, the association with a far country of great mountain peaks, but also for its population. Miss Dawson had travelled and bird-watched wherever she went, and photographed and lectured on birds, and her walls were decorated with beautiful prints of rare birds. Seen dimly in the shadowy room, they sometimes seemed alive. But there was no doubt about the busy life that went on among the branches of the deodar. Miss Dawson knew all the tree’s regular visitors and residents better than she knew the residents of The Haven, for she was something of a recluse. There were tree creepers, wood pigeons, of course, robins and tits, best of all a pair of gold crests. Miss Dawson was never tired of watching them and listening to their varied conversation. She knew many of the other birds besides, not just the ones that belonged to her tree. The thrush that Lord Jim had brought her had nested for three years past in the old shrubbery lilacs. He had become very tame, which of course was his undoing. Painfully crippled though she was with her arthritis, and only able to walk with sticks, Miss Dawson had managed to wrap up the thrush in a handkerchief and placing it in the bag which she always wore slung round her neck, she edged herself down to Mrs Perry who promised to bury it out of reach of Lord Jim. Not that actually he ever did eat his prey, he was too well fed for that and killed merely for sport.
“I believe you know every bird in this garden,” said Mrs Perry to Miss Dawson.
They were having tea together in Mrs Perry’s room which had been the morning room. It was one of the lightest and most cheerful in the house, on the south side and with a bow window overlooking her own garden patch. She suffered from a chronic bronchial condition and was always grateful that she had been able to have this particular room. Though she would not admit it, even to herself, Miss Dawson was sometimes quite glad, especially on chilly days when the radiator didn’t radiate much, to leave her dim retreat for a time. She had eased herself into the comfortable chair that was always kept free for her and was enjoying the pleasant illusion of an early summer’s day provided by the jar of warm coloured wallflowers on the round table and the row of robust polyanthus and primula pot plants on the windowsill. Though a born solitary, she was human enough to feel the need of congenial company sometimes and she had discovered that she and Mrs Perry shared a love of nature, though in somewhat different aspects and ways, for Mrs Perry’s feeling for flowers was not in the least professional. They were drawn together, too, by the treatment they had suffered at the paws of Lord Jim.
“It’s a wonder there’s a bird left for me to know with that wretched cat around,” said Miss Dawson.
“He’s been taking his usual siesta on the top of my poor pansies,” mourned Mrs Perry gently.
“As if birds hadn’t enough to put up with,” went on Miss Dawson, “with all the destruction of nesting sites that goes on and ghastly pesticides poisoning their food, without cats, and there seems more of them about every year.”
“I don’t blame Lord Jim so much,” said Mrs Perry, “but he is so spoiled. Miss Blackett lets him do just as he likes. She has never attempted to train him.”
“You can’t train cats,” snapped Miss Dawson. “The only thing to do is to get rid of them.”
Mrs Perry was silent. She respected her friend too much to contradict her but she knew that you could train cats. Their family cats had all been trained to take “No” for an answer, to keep off flower beds and never to thieve food from tables. She poured herself out another cup of tea.
“I believe Miss Blackett takes the top off all our milk for him,” she said, “it’s so thin.”
“Most likely,” said Miss Dawson.
“But to do her justice, she probably gives him all the cream off hers first.”
“More fool her,” said Miss Dawson.
They were interrupted in this comforting talk by Gisela coming in to collect the trays. She seemed upset and nearly dropped a cup. She was easily given to tears and appeared on the brink of them now.
“What’s the matter, Gisela?’ asked kind Mrs Perry.
“It’s that Miss Norton. I do not understand at all. She had beautiful picture of a white horse and many dogs and I try to please and I say: ‘Miss Norton, what a beautiful picture of a white horse and many dogs,’ and Miss Norton speak quite cross, and she say, ‘They are hounds not dogs and the horse, she is grey,’ and the horse is white, white, WHITE,” her voice went up the scale almost to a shriek, “and I speak English, not German and say ‘dog’ properly and not ‘hund’.”
It seemed too difficult to try to explain so Mrs Perry merely said, “Never mind, dear, you are getting along very nicely with your English.”
Miss Dawson, who took not the slightest interest in Gisela or Miss Norton, simply waited until the room was quiet again.
“Yes, the only way with cats is to get rid of them,” she then repeated.
“I can’t see how Lord Jim is to be got rid of,” said Mrs Perry.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said Miss Dawson, so firmly that Mrs Perry felt a little disturbed. She wished Frances Dawson had something else to think about than her birds and her tree. She herself had a loving family most of whom, though they were at a distance, regularly phoned or wrote, and there were a couple of nice grandchildren who managed to visit her fairly frequently, and sometimes brought her cuttings and plants, for gardening was a family addiction. She was afraid, too, that Frances was often in pain, she was such a valiant creature that she never complained, and sometimes perhaps it was better to complain a little. She thought she would change the subject.
“The apple blossom’s scarcely shown yet, it’s been such a cold spring, but the lilac’s brave as usual, and the warden was picking a lot of it this morning, for the committee meeting tomorrow, I suppose. It’s a funny thing about lilac, sometimes it behaves well when it’s picked, but more often than not it wilts in a most tiresome fashion.”
“Oh, if there’s a committee, I suppose the dining-room will be out of action and we’ll have meals in our rooms,” said Miss Dawson with some satisfaction.
“Why don’t we ask Gisela to bring yours in here and we’ll have them together,” suggested Mrs Perry.
“No, thank you, Mary,” said Miss Dawson. There was a limit to her capacity for companionship and this was reached fairly quickly and often quite suddenly. She was subject, too, to a queer feeling, almost of disloyalty, if she were absent too long from her room and her tree. Mrs Perry did not press her, accepting though not understanding her friend’s ways by this time, so that she was sorry but not in the least offended.
The two continued to chat amiably until it was time to prepare for supper. Although the main meal at The Haven was in the middle of the day, the old ladies had been used in past years to changing for dinner and as long as they were able, they did so still. It was part of the courageous losing battle that was perpetually being waged within those discreet walls. Miss Blackett, who shared the midday meal, only “saw to” the supper. She and Lord Jim ate together later when the day’s work was almost done and she could relax. It was the favourite hour of her day when, with her television set switched on and Lord Jim purring expectantly at her feet, they could enjoy a snack of whatever took their fancy.
