Mary Stewart - Airs Above the Ground

Nor take her tea without a stratagem.

Carmel Lacy is the silliest woman I know, which is saying a good deal. The only reason that I was having tea with her in Harrods on that wet Thursday afternoon was that when she rang me up she had been so insistent that it had been impossible to get out of; and besides, I was so depressed anyway that even tea with Carmel Lacy was preferable to sitting alone at home in a room that still seemed to be echoing with that last quarrel with Lewis. That I had been entirely in the right, and that Lewis had been insufferably, immovably, furiously in the wrong was no particular satisfaction, since he was now in Stockholm, and I was still here in London, when by rights we should have been lying on a beach together in the Italian sunshine, enjoying the first summer holiday we had been able to plan together since our honeymoon two years ago. The fact that it had rained almost without ceasing ever since he had gone hadn't done anything to mitigate his offence; and when, on looking up "Other People's Weather" in the Guardian each morning, I found Stockholm enjoying a permanent state of sunshine, and temperatures somewhere in the seventies, I was easily able to ignore the reports of a wet, thundery August in southern Italy and concentrate steadily on Lewis's sins and my own grievances.

"What are you scowling about?" asked Carmel Lacy.

"Was I? I'm sorry. I suppose I'm just depressed with the weather and everything. I certainly didn't mean to glower at you! Do go on. Did you decide to buy it in the end?"

"I haven't made up my mind. It's always so terribly difficult to decide..." Her voice trailed away uncertainly as she contemplated the plate of cakes, her hand poised between a meringue and an eclair.

"But you know what they're like nowadays, they won't keep things for you. If I wait much longer they'll simply sell it, and when that happens, one realizes one's really wanted it like mad all along."

And if you wait much longer, I thought, as she selected the eclair, it won't fit you any more. But I didn't think it unkindly; plumpness suits Carmel Lacy, who is one of those blonde, pretty women whose looks depend on the fair, soft colouring which seems to go on indestructibly into middle age, and to find a whole new range of charm when the fair hair turns white.

Carmel-whose hair was still a rather determined shade of gold-had been my mother's contemporary at school. Her kind of prettiness had been fashionable then, and her good-tempered softness had made her popular; her nickname, according to my mother, had been Caramel, which seemed appropriate. She had not been a close friend of Mother's at school, but the two girls were thrown together in the holidays by the nearness of their families and by professional connections between them. Carmel's father had owned and trained race horses, while my grandfather, who was a veterinary surgeon, had been, so to speak, surgeon in attendance. Soon after the girls left school their ways parted: my mother married her father's young partner and stayed in Cheshire; but Carmel left home for London where she married

"successfully"; that is, she acquired a wealthy London banker whose dark, florid good looks told you exactly the kind of man he would be in his forties, safely ensconced in the Jaguar belt with three carefully spaced children away at carefully chosen schools. But the marriage had not worked out. Carmel, to all appearances the kind of soft maternal creature whom you would have sworn would make the ideal wife and mother, combined with this a possessiveness so clinging that it had threatened to drown her family like warm treacle. The eldest girl had gone first, off into the blue with a casually defiant announcement that she had got a job in Canada. The second daughter had torn herself loose at nineteen and followed her Air Force husband to Malta without a backward look. The husband had gone next, leaving a positive embarrassment of riches in the way of evidence for the divorce. Which left the youngest child, Timothy, whom I vaguely remembered meeting around his grandfather's stables during school holidays; a slight, darting, quicksilver boy with a habit of sulky silences, readily forgivable in any child exposed to the full blast of his mother's devotion.

She was moaning comfortably over him now, having disposed (as far as I had been able to follow her) of her dressmaker, her doctor, her current escort, her father, my mother, two more cream cakes and, for some reason which I cannot now remember, the Postmaster General....

"... And as a matter of fact I don't know what to do. He's being so difficult. He knows just how to get on my nerves. Dr. Schwapp was saying only yesterday-"

"Timmy's being difficult?"

"Well, of course. Not that his father wasn't just the same, in fact his father started the whole thing. You'd really think he'd have the decency to keep out of Timmy's life now, wouldn't you, after what he did?"

"Is he coming back into Timmy's life?"

"My dear, that's the whole point. It's all just come out, and that's why I'm so upset. He's been writing to Timmy, quite regularly, imagine, and now apparently he wants him to go and see him."

I said, feeling my way: "He's abroad, isn't he, your-Tim's father?"

"Graham? Yes, he's living in Vienna. We don't write," said Carmel with what was, for her, remarkable brevity.

"And has he seen anything of Timothy since the divorce?" I added awkwardly: "I didn't know what the arrangements were at the time, Aunt Carmel."

She said with an irritation momentarily more genuine than any feeling she had shown up to now: "For goodness' sake don't call me that, it makes me feel a hundred! What do you mean, you don't know what the arrangements were? Everybody knew. You can't tell me your mother didn't tell you every singledetail at the time."

I said, more coldly than I had meant to: "I wasn't at home, if you remember: I was still in Edinburgh."

"Well, Graham got access, if that's what you mean by 'arrangements.' But he went abroad straight away, and Timmy's never seen him since. I never even knew they were writing.... And now this!" Her voice had risen, her blue eyes stared, but I still thought that she sounded aggrieved rather than distressed.

"I tell you, Timmy just burst it on me the other day, boys are so thoughtless, and after all I've been to him, father and mother both, all the poor boy has... And all without a word to me! Would you believe such a thing, Vanessa? Would you?"

I hesitated, then said more gently: "I'm sorry, but it seems quite natural to me. After all, Timothy hasn't quarrelled with his father, and it seems a pity to keep them apart. I mean, they're bound to want to see each other now and again, and you mustn't think you mean any the less to him because he sometimes feels the need of his father. I-it's none of my business, Carmel, and I'm sorry if I sound a bit pompous, but you did ask me."

"But not to tell me! So underhand! That he should have secrets from me, his mother..." Her voice throbbed. "I feel it, Vanessa, I feel it here." She groped for where her heart presumably lay, somewhere behind the ample curve of her left breast, failed to locate it, and, abandoning the gesture, poured herself another cup of tea. "You know what it says in the Bible about a thankless child? 'Sharper than a something's paw it is,' or something like that? Well, I can tell you as a mother, that's exactly how it feels!

Sharper than the whatever-it-is.... But of course, I can't expect you to understand!"

The more than conscious drama which was creeping into Carmel's conversation had dispelled any pity which I might have been feeling for her and centered it firmly on Timothy. And I was wondering more than ever just where I came in. She had surely not telephoned me so urgently just because she needed an audience; she had her own devoted bridge set, with whom, doubtless, all this had already been gone over; moreover, she had managed to make it clear already that she didn't expect either sympathy or understanding from anyone of my generation.