Read Online Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

to nibble it, staring at his fragile hands, which looked blue with cold, from some draughty English kitchen, she supposed.
    When he had gone, she asked, “Where did he come from, and why?”
    “He’s been with us for some years,” Amy said. She still expressed herself as if Nick were alive, saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ so often, and then falling silent, as she did now.
    “He seems very strange, and his hands were blue with cold,” Martha said accusingly.
    “He has a poor circulation. He will tell you all about it if he has a chance.”
    “But where did you get him from?”
    “The pub along the tow-path. Nick used to go thereafter work each evening, and Ernie was working in the bar there, and then one evening he told Nick he’d got the sack.”
    “What for?”
    “I dare say customers reacted to him as you seem to be doing. He got on their nerves.”
    “Does he get on yours?”
    “Yes, sometimes… his ailments.”
    “So, when he got the sack?”
    Lolling back in her chair, steadily eating biscuits as if to satisfy a long-felt need, Martha dropped crumbs onto her lap, and occasionally brushed them off onto the carpet. She is going to be untidy about the place, Amy was thinking. Two long days. She glanced up at the clock. What could she do with her for all that time? The long evening ahead, for instance. They could not – surely? – just talk all the time. What to talk about? For the present there was Ernie and she decided to spin him out. “I had shingles at the time,” she said. “In those days we had a woman who came in just two mornings a week, so poor Nick had to do the cooking, and carry up trays, and trying to get together an exhibition too. I couldn’t move. . It’s a wretched thing. Have you ever had it?”
    “No,” said Martha, trying to get back to Ernie.
    “Well, so Ernie came to help Nick. He had nowhere else to go. It was to be just for while I was ill, or until he found another job; but he simply stayed. Getting a new job wasn’t mentioned after a while. He took over the house, and I suppose I didn’t really mind. He’s very good at it. He says he was a sailor once, and they’re usually domesticated.”
    “You say he says he was a sailor. Don’t you believe him?”
    “I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.” She lowered her voice, and said, “No, I don’t always believe what he tells me, but it’s not important. Would you like some more biscuits?” The plate was now empty.
    Martha shook her head. She hadn’t bothered to drink her tea, which was cold. She got up and switched on a table-lamp, just as if she were in her own house, Amy thought.
    “What’s his name?”
    “Ernie’s? Pounce. Ernie Pounce. Terribly good, don’t you think?”
    Martha didn’t answer. She was considering Amy’s voice – the light, clear English tone, all syllables articulate, the disposition quite detached.
‘Terribly
good, don’t you think?’ No one in America talked like that. She was out to learn; meant not to return to her own land until she had really got England. (She had never managed to get Italy, because of its enchanting-sounding, but to her incomprehensible language.) Even in Istanbul, Amy had appeared as the English woman complete. She had thought them a dead race. Now she stood up by the lamp she had switched on, brushed her skirt of crumbs, yawned.
    “What happened to the domestic help? Who used to come in, what was it, two mornings?”
    “Mrs. Carpenter?”
    “Whoever.” Martha shrugged.
    Amy, suddenly fed up with it all, leaned back and smiled, pretended to look as if Martha’s yawning were catching, and she might drowse off any minute.“Ernie saw to Mrs Carpenter,” she said.
    Another thing about the English, Martha noted; they close up; they suddenly want to go home, or for you to. She thought they must be the fastest givers-up in the world, remembered wars, but dismissed that sort of tenacity as coming from having had no choice.
    “What was the war like?”