Bobby’s Room by Douglas Dunn. Part 5.
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A girl from an Edinburgh family asked Henry if he played tennis. He said he did.
She asked if there was a court. He told her where the nearest one was, two miles away in the village.
‘I don’t have anyone to play with, she said. She didn’t sound as if she wanted particularly to play with Henry.
Her mother appeared at the door of the sitting room. ‘Are you coming with us, or are you staying behind?’ The woman’s voice stated these options firmly, and Henry recognized the predicaments of both girl and parents.
Mrs Bawden came to the sitting-room door.
‘Have you asked him?’ the woman said to her daughter.
‘It’s two miles away, the girl said, meaning that the court was too far to be practical.
‘We’ll drop you off at the court, said her father from inside, through a rustle of newspaper.
‘You haven’t had proper company for nearly a month, Mrs Bawden said to Henry. ‘Go and play tennis if you want. I can answer the door and do what needs to be done. I can manage well enough without you.’
He ran upstairs, changed, got his racquet and a box of tennis balls. When he came down, the family of three was waiting in the hall, and the front door was open. The breeze disturbed the potpourri in the bowl on the hall table.
‘I’m told that your father and mother are in Singapore, said the man when they were in the car. ‘Very interesting, he said. ‘Very interesting. Henry had the impression he had been vetted and found to be a suitable companion for the girl.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her as they strolled to the tennis court.
‘Louise,’ she said.
‘I know what it’s like. At least yours haven’t gone to Singapore’
‘I wish they would’
‘My mother’s forgotten something, and it probably hasn’t dawned on her yet. I’ll be fifteen in a couple of weeks and she won’t be here.’
‘It isn’t much of a tennis court, Louise said.
She got bored and sat down, ignoring Henry’s tepid but ironic serves as they bounced close beside her. Looking at her, he thought that there might be two major ways in which only children could turn out: they became either super-obliging, obedient models of courtesy and good behaviour or, like Louise, rebelliously surly and aggrieved. He never allowed his own grievances to show, and doubted if he ever would.
‘When did your father say he’d pick us up?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘What do you think of Mrs Bawden?’
‘She certainly doesn’t have any secrets’
‘And Mr Bawden?’
‘I didn’t know there was one. I thought she was a widow.’
‘No secrets?’
‘I feel sorry for Bobby,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand it if my parents talked about me like that’
‘She misses him, Henry said charitably, although he was interested that Louise disapproved of Mrs Bawden’s lack of reticence as much as he did.
‘I think I’d like to travel, Louise said. ‘My father says that air travel will grow enormously in the next few years. I would like to be an air hostess’
‘It’s Bobby’s room I’ve got. I think I’d like him. I imagine myself talking to him. I ask him what he’d do in my circumstances.’
‘And I suppose you get some sort of mysterious answer, she said sarcastically. ‘Do they have a gramophone in that house? I haven’t heard a single decent record since we came away.’
‘He doesn’t say anything, Henry said. ‘But I see him winking at me. I don’t know what it means. Do you ever try to figure out what your dreams mean?’
‘Isn’t there somewhere we can get lemonade or something?’ she said peev-ishly. ‘I’m parched!’
‘We could buy some in the shop,’ he said, ‘but there isn’t a café.’
‘What a dump!’
‘I don’t think you like being in the country,’ ‘I don’t like being with my parents. I’d rather be in the city with my friends. At least there’s something to do.’
‘Is your father coming back for us?’
‘I doubt it. I think we’re expected to walk.’
She was unsympathetic and, Henry decided, stupid. She was also unhappy. It was her unhappiness that made her interesting. Her dislikes, her petulant good looks, her tone of voice gave the impression she was festering on the edge of a bitter family insurrection. He wondered what his father had found appealing in his mother. Louise made him think that his mother might have been like her at that age, twenty years before, in the nineteen-thirties. All that would have been different was that other kinds of music, other friends were being missed.
They walked back slowly. When they reached Netherbank, Louise’s father’s car was parked outside with several others. Her parents were in the garden with the Bawdens. The clear light peculiar to Galloway seeped out of the hill and fields and met a great arc of early-evening light rising from the sea. Louise’s parents were holding hands. Henry thought that if his parents had been there, too, he would have experienced a moment in which the significance of how people exist to each other was clear and unmistakable. People who mattered less clouded the issue. He pressed Louise’s hand, but she pulled it away.
At mid-morning the following day, Louise’s father said to Henry, ‘Do you keep an address book? If you don’t then you should. Everyone ought to. Say goodbye, you two, he said, looking at Louise. Henry felt that Louise had given a glowing report of him to her parents, even though, in his company, she had been stand-offish, pert, and sardonic. ‘You should exchange addresses and keep in touch,’ her father added. He was strangely open and affable.
Louise produced her address book, and Henry dictated his address to her.
‘I think that’s very nice,’ said Mrs Bawden. ‘I think it’s so nice’ she said to Louise’s mother, ‘that young people should exchange addresses and keep in touch!’
Mr Bawden came in by the front door, surprised to find guests still in the house that late in the morning. He could hardly turn round and go out again and found himself in the company.
‘They’re exchanging addresses. Isn’t that nice, John?’ his wife said.
Mr Bawden smiled at his wife, with whose obsessive and candid garrulity he was very tenderly and very gently browned off.
‘Write letters,’ she urged Louise. Write letters and use the phone only when you have to. Letters are much nicer. You can keep letters, but you can’t keep phone calls. Have you taken a note of Louise’s address?’ she asked Henry.
‘My book’s upstairs. I’ll take it from the visitors’ book’ As Mrs Bawden went out of the front door with Louise’s parents, Henry followed with Louise. ‘We don’t have to write, he said.
‘I’m not good at letters. If you write first, you’ll have a wait for an answer.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know if you’d understand why!
She looked at him, and laughed quietly, but she was complimented by a surprising remark that sounded serious and mature. Her wave from the departing car was curious and concerned.
Henry waved back, and then went upstairs to strip those beds that needed to be freshly made for the arrival of new guests in the late afternoon and early evening. He suspected that a time would come when his parents would regret the three months in which they had hived him off to the Bawdens. He thought about the crisis that his awakening independence would cause in their lives; still he doubted if when it arrived they would be able to trace it back to his weeks in that safe, homely, and respectable house, or to that quaint old couple who lived in daily expectation of a letter from their son Bobby, in whose room Henry slept.
Go back to Part 4