The Mouse by Frances King. Part 1.
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Vernon Thurible loved his wife, Stella, as much as their daughter, Mavis, loved the white mouse which they gave her for her seventh birthday. Mavis had herself asked for the mouse, insisting that it was one mouse only, and not a pair, that she wanted: ‘It won’t be lonely,’ she said, ‘because, you see, it will always have me for its friend. I don’t want it to have other friends, she added. Vernon and Stella thought this explanation charming, and they repeated it widely in their Blackheath circle. They both adored their child.
On the day when they bought the mouse in the pet department of a large London store, they had one of their many quarrels; and, as usual, money was the cause. For a man who affected to despise money, Vernon spent an inordinate amount of time thinking how he could make it, or make his wife borrow it.
It was when they came to pay for the mouse (it was handed to them in a small wicker cage which was wrapped in brown paper) that Vernon had to face the disagreeable discovery that Stella had nothing but a single ten-shilling note in her bag; so that, as they walked to the underground, he spent the time either chiding her for having spent so much that week or urging her to ask her mother for more. Vernon despised Stella’s relatives, who were in business, while his were in trade. ‘You were always talking about your rich uncles and aunts before we got married. But now, when it’s a question either of keeping your pride or of letting your child starve, you prefer to keep your pride’
‘You know it’s not that, Vernon darling.’ Stella, who was small and thin, with a delicate pink and white colouring and prettily weak features, slipped her arm through her husband’s. ‘But it’s so awful to have to ask and ask and ask. And we still owe Mummy that fifty pounds we borrowed last year’.
‘If she’d had any generosity, she’d have made it a gift. She’s supposed to be so fond of Mavis, isn’t she? And yet if it comes to helping us over a bad patch, she won’t lift a finger!’ The life of the Thuribles was made up of ‘bad patches’.
So Vernon continued to nag; but the curious thing was that, as he did so, his voice was never anything but friendly and reasonable, and his intelligent, humorously vivid face never ceased to smile. But for Stella’s look of distress any passer-by would have assumed that they were at that moment on the best of terms.
The Thuribles were now standing on the platform, and Vernon was saying:
‘Oh, I’m sick of this endless living from hand to mouth. No wonder I can’t write music, when I have to worry about money day after day after day. Little did I guess what a millstone I was putting round my neck that evening I proposed to you.’
When he saw the tears in Stella’s eyes, he gave a good-natured laugh, to show that he was joking: no one could say that Vernon was lacking in a sense of humour. ‘How wonderful it would be to have my freedom again! Do you remember how you used to say that two could live as cheaply as one? You’ve never been much good at addition, have you?’ He swung the cage back and forth, apparently forgetful of the terrified animal that was being rolled from side to side with feebly convulsive claws that scratched on the wicker. Really, one day I think I shall have to get rid of you!’ Stella, head lowered, was blinking away the tears with her long, flaxen eye-lashes. He came up behind her: Just one push’ – his hands were on her shoulders – ‘gently – like this.’ His green eyes were flashing with merriment, and as he spoke he laughed; but Stella (who tended, as Vernon often said, to hysteria) wrenched herself free and shot through the tunnel to the opposite platform from which trains went north, instead of south. There was a train just leaving, and she was able to squeeze herself in before the doors closed on Vernon’s outraged face.
At the next stop, Stella got out, and caught the bus to Blackheath; and there at the bus stop, waiting as if she had told him how she would come, Vernon was standing, with the mouse’s cage still in his hand. Stella laughed as she climbed off the bus and Vernon laughed too, putting an arm round her shoulder.
Go to Part 2