A Bit off the Map and Other Stories by Angus Wilson

Author:Angus Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571253098
Publisher: faber and faber
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

As tea-time approached Eileen Carter became as excited as a schoolgirl. Although a strict guardian of her conscience, she was not inclined to be conscious of her own moods – to have been so would have seemed to her dangerously near to emotional fudge. Her present elation, however, was too violent to escape her notice and she told herself sharply not to be swoony. Esther Barrington was a good, brave little woman; it was lucky for both of them that they had broken through the barriers of shyness, for loneliness helped nobody in this world; she was only so pleased that her comfortable sufficiency in life allowed her to brighten a little the drudge-like existence of someone so decent; that was all there was to it. All the rest was fudge.

As she passed through the kitchen to the garden, old Madge glowed warmth at her. ‘I’m making some of those griddle cakes Mrs Barrington loves. It does one good to see her enjoying herself, doesn’t it, Miss Eileen.’ Eileen’s usual gruff notes were almost a bark as she answered, ‘All right, Madge, but don’t worry me with it, I’m up to my eyes in work’. And so she was, she thought, with twenty herbaceous plants to move; the work ought to have been done a week ago.

It was, therefore, a vast prospect of buttocks stretching tight a chocolate and white striped cloth skirt that confronted Esther as she turned into the garden at a quarter to four that afternoon.

‘Heavens above! Eileen,’ she cried, ‘surely you’re not putting more plants into that border.’

Eileen’s pink cheeks were scarlet almost to apoplexy point as she swung her broad shoulders round to face her visitor.

‘I’m only moving these damned phloxes,’ she grunted, ‘every one’s got a hell of a great root. God knows whether they’re worth moving, they’re probably riddled with bloody eelworm.’ It was a mark of her shyness that she used to Eileen the ‘bad language’ that she normally only employed in her voluntary social work to show that she was not an old frump.

‘But surely you can tell.’

‘No, I can’t,’ Eileen said emphatically, ‘the damned leaves are all floppy but that may be due to this summer’s drought.’

‘You should let Jim come and advise you,’ Esther said. In her present mood, she rushed to get in her husband’s name as soon as possible.

Eileen Carter ran her hand through her untidy greying black bob with impatience. ‘I have some pretensions to being a gardener myself, Esther,’ she said.

‘A very good one,’ her friend replied, ‘but Jim poor dear has to know these things professionally.’

‘Professional gardeners in my experience,’ Eileen said, ‘always make a balls up.’

Esther’s pretty blue eyes flashed angrily for a moment in her thin lined face, then she decided that the poor old thing was in one of her moods. ‘Most of them do, of course,’ she said. ‘Double begonias and calceolarias, they couldn’t have more ghastly taste.’ Her voice, as she spoke, took on the upper-middle-class drawl she had only found again recently in her friendship with Eileen.

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