He was accustomed to Louisa’s food: whelks, periwinkles, milts and roes, chitterlings and sweetbreads, giblets, brains and the tripes of ruminating animals. Louisa prepared them at long ease, by many processes of affusion, diffusion and immersion, requiring many pans of brine, many purifications and simmerings, much sousing and sweetening by slow degrees. She seldom bought an ordinary cut or joint, and held that people who went through life ignoring the inward vitals of shells and beasts didn’t know what was good for them.
‘If you won thirty thousand in the pool, what would you do?’ Laurence said.
‘Buy a boat,’ she replied.
‘I would paddle you up and down the river,’ Laurence said. ‘A houseboat would be nice. Do you remember that fortnight on the houseboat, my first year at prep school?’
‘I mean a boat for crossing the sea. Yes, it was lovely on the houseboat.’
‘A yacht? Oh, how grand.’
‘Well, a good-sized boat,’ said Louisa, ‘that’s what I’d buy. Suitable for crossing the Channel.’
‘A motor cruiser,’ Laurence suggested.
‘That’s about it,’ she said.
‘Oh, how grand.’
She did not reply, for he had gone too far with his ‘Oh, how grand!’
‘We could do the Mediterranean,’ he said.
‘Oh, how grand,’ she said.
‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to buy a house?’ Laurence had just remembered his mother’s plea, ‘If you get an opportunity do try to persuade her to take a little money from us and live comfortably in her own house.’
She answered, ‘No. But if I won a smaller sum I’d buy this cottage. I’m sure Mr Webster would sell.’
‘Oh, I’d love to think of you having the cottage for your very own. Smugglers Retreat is such a dear little house.’ Even as he spoke Laurence knew that phrases like ‘your very own’ and ‘dear little house’ betrayed what he was leading up to, they were not his grandmother’s style.
‘I know what you’re leading up to,’ said Louisa. ‘Help yourself to the cigarettes.’
‘I have my own. Why won’t you let father buy the cottage for you? He can afford it.’
‘I manage very nicely,’ said Louisa. ‘Smoke one of these — they come from Bulgaria.’
‘Oh, how grand!’ But he added, ‘How extremely smart and where did you get them from?’
‘Bulgaria. I think through Tangiers.’
Laurence examined the cigarette. His grandmother, a perpetual surprise. She rented the cottage, lived as an old-age pensioner.
Her daughter Helena said frequently, ‘God knows how she manages. But she always seems to have plenty of everything.’
Helena would tell her friends, ‘My mother won’t accept a penny. Most independent; the Protestant virtues, you know. God knows how she manages. Of course, she’s half gipsy, she has the instinct for contriving ways and means.
‘Really! Then you have gipsy blood, Helena? Really, and you so fair, how romantic. One would never have thought —’
‘Oh, it comes out in me sometimes,’ Helena would say.
It was during the past four years, since the death of her husband, penniless, that Louisa had revealed, by small tokens and bit by bit, an aptitude for acquiring alien impenetrable luxuries.
Manders’ Figs in Syrup, with its seventy-year-old trademark — an oriental female yearning her draped form towards, and apparently worshipping a fig tree — was the only commodity that Louisa was willing to accept from her daughter’s direction. Louisa distributed the brown sealed jars of this confection among her acquaintance; it kept them in mind of the living reality underlying their verbal tradition, ‘Mrs Jepp’s daughter was a great beauty, she married into Manders’ Figs in Syrup.’
‘Tell your father,’ said Louisa, ‘that I have not written to thank him because he is too busy to read letters. He will like the Bulgarian cigarettes. They smell very high. Did he like my figs?’
‘Oh yes, he was much amused.’
‘So your mother told me when she wrote last. Did he like them?’
‘Loved them, I’m sure. But we were awfully tickled.’
Louisa, in her passion for pickling and preserving, keeps up with the newest methods. Some foods go into jars, others into tins sealed by her domestic canning machine. When Louisa’s own figs in syrup, two cans of them with neatly pencilled labels, had arrived for Sir Edwin Manders, Helena had felt uneasy at first.
‘Is she having a lark with us, Edwin?’
‘Of course she is.’
Helena was not sure what sort of a lark. She wrote to Louisa that they were all very amused.
‘Did they enjoy the figs?’ Louisa pressed Laurence.
‘Yes, they were lovely.’
‘They are as good as Manders’, dear, but don’t tell your father I said so.’
‘Better than Manders’,’ Laurence said.
‘Did you taste some, then?’
‘Not actually. But I know they were most enjoyable, Mother said’ (which Helena had not said).
‘Well, that’s what I sent them for. To be enjoyed. You shall have some later. I don’t know what they are talking about — “much amused”. Tell your father that I’m giving him the cigarettes for enjoyment, tell him that, my dear.’
Laurence was smoking his Bulgarian. ‘Most heady,’ he said. ‘But Mother takes a fit when you send expensive presents. She knows you have to deny yourself and —’
He was about to say ‘pinch and scrape’, using his mother’s lamenting words; but this would have roused the old lady. Besides, the phrase was obviously inaccurate; his grandmother was surrounded by her sufficiency, always behind which hovered a suspicion of restrained luxury. Even her curious dishes seemed chosen from an expansive economy of spirit rather than any consideration of their cost in money.
‘Helena is a sweet girl, but she does deceive herself. I’m not in need of anything, as she could very well see, if she took the trouble. There is no need for Helena to grieve on my account.’
Laurence was away all day, with his long legs in his small swift car, gone to look round and about the familiar countryside and coastline, gone to meet friends of his own stamp and education, whom he sometimes brought back to show off to them his funny delicious grandmother. Louisa Jepp did many things during that day. She fed the pigeons and rested. Rather earnestly, she brought from its place a loaf of white bread, cut the crust off one end, examined the loaf, cut another slice, and looked again. After the third slice she began at the other end, cutting the crust, peering at the loaf until, at the fourth slice, she smiled at what she saw, and patting the slices into place again put back the loaf in the tin marked ‘bread’.
At nine o’clock Laurence returned. The sitting-room which looked out on the village was very oblong in shape. Here he found his grandmother with visitors, three men. They had been playing rummy, but now they were taking Louisa’s refreshments, seated along each side of the room. One was in an invalid chair; this was a young man, not more than twenty-four.
‘Mr Hogarth, my grandson; my grandson, Mr Webster; and this is young Mr Hogarth. My grandson is on the B.B.C., my daughter’s son, Lady Manders. You’ve heard him give the commentaries on the football and the races, Laurence Manders.’
‘Heard you last Saturday.’ This was Mr Webster, the oldest guest, almost as old as Louisa.
‘Saw you this morning,’ Laurence said.
Mr Webster looked surprised.
‘With the baker’s van,’ Laurence added.
Louisa said, ‘Laurence is very observant, he has to be for his job.’
Laurence, who was aglow from several drinks, spoke the obliging banality, ‘I never forget a face’, and turning to the elder Hogarth he said, ‘For instance, I’m sure I’ve seen your face somewhere before.’ But here, Laurence began to lose certainty. ‘At least — you resemble someone I know but I don’t know who.’