Wish Her Safe At Home

by Stephen Benatar

“ Oh, shut up, everybody!” That was Mr. Danby. “Let Rachel have her say.”

  “Actually it’s something very newly published. I was reading the reviews. It’s a book about David.”

  I had forgotten that Mr. Danby’s name was David. I’d never called him by it, any more than—until just now—he had ever called me Rachel. There were screams of amusement and much foot-stamping and ribaldry.

  “ King David,” I explained.

  “Dear Lord! He’s been promoted.”

  “No, it’s just that it’s official, he’s been using the royal we for years!”

  I laughed. I persevered. I always had this urge to share things with those to whom I felt indebted. “For a long time now King David’s been important in my life.”

  Nobody quite knew what to make of that. Even those who hadn’t been listening sensed that others were intrigued. “What did she say? What did she just say?”

  “Did you know for instance that somebody once called him a man after God’s own heart?”

  “ No!”

  I nodded. “And this was despite the fact he as good as murdered Uriah the Hittite so that he could woo Uriah’s wife. Yes, even despite this, God still loved him and God still favoured him.”

  And now there was certainly silence. People gazed at me from every side, either standing like myself or sitting on chairs or tables, their thick white cups in one hand, perhaps a chocolate éclair or a cream horn in the other.

  “I can guess what you’re going to say of course. You’re going to say that he repented.”

  “He repented!” cried Una, the pretty little blonde. She gave a giggle.

  “But what I want to know is, would he actually have given up Bathsheba? Would he have changed things even if he’d had the chance?”

  “Oh, come on, you lot, let’s have a show of hands! Now all who think—”

  “So that’s why you’re going to buy the book, is it, Rachel?”

  Mr. Danby had obviously been feeling anxious. But he needn’t have worried: the teasing was affectionate and I could take it in good part.

  “Well,” he went on, “we trust it will provide you with much pleasure, Rachel, indeed we do, and also... er... with much enlightenment. Thank you for telling us.”

  There was a big round of applause. As the party gradually broke up there were comments of “Slayed ’em in the aisles, Rachel!,” “Good for you, Miss Waring!,” “Always said you were a dark horse!” I was so relieved. I had unquestionably felt jittery before I’d begun—but because I had tried to tell them what was in my heart it seemed I might have scored a minor victory. Perhaps I could congratulate myself on having provided a leave-taking that wouldn’t just blend in with all the rest.

  “Do you want to pack up now, Rachel, and catch an earlier bus?”

  “Thank you... er... David.” And then, to cover up my small embarrassment, “Thank ’ee kindly, sire!”

  11

  It was a Saturday. Sylvia came to see me off at Paddington.

  “And I bloody well hope,” she said, “that some day you won’t regret all this.”

  Although I knew she meant precisely the opposite and although I hadn’t even wanted her to come I still replied amiably. “I can assure you, you don’t hope it nearly as much as I do.”

  “What a dump this station is.”

  “I rather like it.”

  “Oh, God! You’re getting more like Pollyanna every day. I’m not surprised they wouldn’t take you with the furniture.”

  I smiled. “You think it wasn’t the insurance, then?” Once I might have worried over that. Now I merely observed, “I hope I haven’t left the flat too bare.”

  In fact I’d taken remarkably little—and, anyway, the woman who’d be moving in had a lot of her own stuff.

  I added after a minute or so of our walking on in silence: “She really does seem fairly pleasant, doesn’t she? Miss Carter?”

  But, naturally, we had already discussed Miss Carter. Sylvia had then been quite cheerful; yet you wouldn’t have known it now. “Oh, before long we’ll probably begin to irritate each other like hell. Give it a month or two.”

  “Well, that’s just being defeatist!”

  “Now tell me something truly uplifting,” she suggested. “Like, for example, life’s simply a snappy little game of pretence—and what fun it is to be a conman! Wasn’t that what you were saying at supper last night? I think I’d feel so much better if you could come up with one final inspirational word to illuminate my darkness.”

  Nevertheless she grumblingly insisted on getting a platform ticket. It seemed well-nigh masochistic.

  I found my seat on the train and then remained in the compartment, standing at a window with the ventilator open—because I thought this would save the obligation of a kiss or an embrace; and a handshake would have seemed all wrong.

  But anyway, not necessarily as a consequence, she suddenly appeared more manageable. I said, “Don’t forget, Sylvia, you’re coming to stay with me this summer!” And my enthusiasm didn’t sound insincere. Nor was it, entirely.

  “Bank Holiday,” she mumbled.

  “Yes.”

  Four months away. I almost said, “Make it Whitsun, why not?” I kept remembering we had lived together, breakfast, supper, lunch and tea for nearly a quarter of our lifetimes. A nicer person would have found it harder saying goodbye.

  “And before then you’d better let me know,” she repeated, grudgingly, “about something you’d like for the house.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  Perhaps one reason I was able to say goodbye so easily was that I felt I’d salved my conscience. I had bought her a video recorder. I had given it to her only about an hour before, while the two removal men were still coming in and staggering out. I believed she was pleased—certainly, if pleasure could be calculated by gruffness, she was pleased. Be that as it may she’d never again be able to accuse me of meanness.

  “Well, then,” she said, “be seeing you, Raitch.” It seemed the flag was about to be lowered. “Don’t forget to ring sometime if you feel like it.”

  “After I’m connected you’ll be the very first I call!”

  She stood there awkwardly on the platform. I stood there awkwardly on the train. “Christ Almighty, ten and a half years!” she said.

  “I know! Isn’t it incredible?”

  It seemed a terribly protracted moment, by far the worst of the whole morning, and I knew I had made a mistake. Had I been on the platform I could so easily have thrown my arms about her—I might even have felt glad to—and by making my way back to my seat just before the whistle blew avoided those last desperately long seconds. It would have been natural, spontaneous. As it was, we just stood there powerless, and separated by glass.

  She didn’t even cough. I realized a short while later—as I was taking my place in the restaurant car—that she hadn’t once had a cigarette in her mouth since our departure from the flat. This had plainly been intended as a gesture.

  But perversely I felt more annoyed than grateful. It seemed as if she hadn’t quite played fair, had cheated a little, both with that and with her final, farewell words.

  “It must be nice having something to look forward to!” she had said. “It must be nice having a home of your own!”

  Afterwards she hadn’t even bid me goodbye; had just languidly raised her arm as the train moved out .

  That wasn’t the kind of con trick I admired.

  12

  I felt now as if I’d never had a real home—anyhow not since the age of eight.

  The rented flat with my mother assuredly hadn’t been a home; it had been a prison. Or at least that’s what it had rapidly become, obscuring earlier memories of snugness and contentment and what had seemed unselfish love; obscuring the fun and irrepressible laughter when I was being tickled in my bed or sliding down the back of the bath and making floods upon the lino. Within a few weeks of my father’s death we had moved into Marylebone High Street; at that time not the wealthy
street it is today. My mother had always been spoilt and somewhat frail—the shock of losing her husband, allied to the fact of our having been bombed out a mere four days after receiving that pitiless telegram; allied to the fact of her having suddenly recognized how relatively poor we had become... these were blows which she unendingly bemoaned throughout the remainder of her life. Add to them a reluctance, even an inability, to cope with so many fundamental chores (no husband and—for the first time ever—no maid) and I suppose that in retrospect it’s not surprising she grew hard.

  But to return to the point. Whether it was a prison or a home, the only time I could remember being consulted on some question of its decoration my opinion had been summarily dismissed; and after that I took no interest.

  Admittedly, when she had died and I was sharing another rented flat, this time with Sylvia, I had done my best, we both had, to make the place comfortable; but I had never particularly regarded it as expressing my own personality—Sylvia’s had always appeared, up to that odd display of weeping and dependence, by far the more assertive.

  Yet now it was different. My homemaking instincts had been aroused. There was something inspiriting about the atmosphere of that house in Bristol, the almost human voice which had bidden me welcome there. It had caused a predominantly cautious person nearly to forget that such a quality existed. I had not only rushed off to Olympia; I had spent fascinated hours in one department store after another, gazing at kitchen units , bathroom fittings, track-lighting—oh, at all manner of things! I may still have been a dull woman but before I quit London and while there were still a few people left to talk to, my dullness had at least gone down a different route. As one slightly overbearing friend had put it when I went to say goodbye—in fact more a friend of Sylvia’s than of mine—“Rachel, you used to be such a gentle, timid little thing. Repressed, even. One wonders what’s got into you.”

  “Ah,” I said mysteriously, “the influence of a good house. Reaching out in spirit the moment I had stepped inside.”

  I laughed and opened my eyes wide and held my hands aloft with outstretched trembling fingers.

  “Woo-ooo... ! Woo-ooo!”

  Even if I hadn’t been about to leave London I might still have needed to make new friends.

  13

  But first there were the more prosaic things: the damp, the rot, the applications to the council. Rewiring, heating, insulation.

  New plumbing. New slates. The removal of the bunkers.

  The filling and refilling of the skip. Sometimes it was this which seemed the most completely satisfying.

  During these earlier stages I compared the whole process to all those years of study and apprenticeship that may finally lead to the work of art, to public recognition and the flowering of an assured, even a flamboyant, personality.

  After that, the things that really showed, the fun things: the workmen with their long ladders, trestle tables, tins of paint, buckets of paste; and the woman who was making the curtains; and the man who was re-covering the chairs; and the firm that was fitting out the kitchen; and the shop that was putting down the carpets. Every day had its excitements. “All those years of study and apprenticeship” reduced basically to just over six weeks: one of the few advantages of the recession—the speed with which large jobs could now be undertaken, the promptitude to match impatience. Some of the last tasks were the repainting of the black railings above the area and those of the tiny balcony; the cleaning of the windows; the application of a final coat to the front door. Its deep gay yellow gloss beneath the shining and winking new knocker and letterbox was redolent of springtime and daffodils and seemed to symbolize all the brightness of my own new life.

  That yellow was a fine choice, the right choice, even if at first I’d been uncertain. But—oh, naughty, naughty me!—I should have remembered: all things work together for good, to them that love God. Yes, I was rather naughty; sang these words to the tune of “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now”; only needing to change “love” to “appreciate” to make the lyric fit. I felt like Oscar Hammerstein.

  And then too, halfway through June, there was the young student who came to do the garden. He was nicely tanned and muscular and worked without his shirt and though I kept being drawn towards the window of my bedroom I found him almost unbearable to watch; in particular the way he swung his pick when breaking up the concrete. And when I went to speak to him, to settle some fresh point or take him out a cooling drink, I was really afraid of what my hands might do. Fly up to feel the film of moisture on his chest? Fondle that coat of darkly golden hair? Dear Lord! The embarrassment! Whatever would one say? “Whoops! Please forgive me! I thought there was a fly.” It was like experiencing a compulsion to punch a baby’s stomach in the pram; or to use on someone standing next to you the carving knife you held.

  He was only twenty-one.

  But despite such unsettling irrelevancies I felt blest to have him there: somebody straight and vigorous and clean who might one day achieve eminence and who would certainly love widely and be widely loved, spin a web of mutual enrichment from the threads of many disparate existences: a beguiling web whose silken strands must soon make way for even me. Indeed, the process had by now begun. He was in the throes of creating my garden. The thread was indissoluble.

  Perhaps all this was slightly fanciful but is there anything much wrong with that? The young man worked from a design of his own, so as to obtain, he said, the prettiest town garden imaginable; and I suggested a handful of refinements. What I wanted, I declared, was first and foremost my seclusion: my own small kingdom, where marvellous and curative things could happen: robins sing arias, neuroses go to seed, fear be altogether uprooted.

  Then I wanted an air of mystery—and romance: you shouldn’t be able to see from one end to the other: it would be nice to have arches and trompe-l’oeil s and a path that enticed you with its possibilities. It would be nice to have a fountain, because I loved water, and a bird-table and some fruit trees and an arbour with a wrought-iron bench. It would be nice to have daisies in the grass—daisies, buttercups, dandelions—and lots of lovely things in flowerbeds, most cunningly variegated.

  I’d also like a hint of wilderness.

  In short—I asked him for the perfect garden: in thirty by a hundred.

  “I’m afraid, Roger, it may be a bit of a tall order. Do you happen to work magic?” Our plotting had almost an air of conspiracy: the two of us pitting our wits against nature. It was as though for a fleeting period he belonged only to myself.

  He claimed neither potions nor spells, however. “But even without them, Miss Waring, wouldn’t you say a tall order is sometimes the most interesting there is?”

  “Do you think, then, we can pull it off?” There was even pleasure in the choice of pronoun.

  “I’ve always wanted to find something just like this—and then to start from scratch—just like this—and... ”

  I understood at once. “Make it your own?” I asked.

  “Well, yes... in a manner of speaking.”

  “The two of us are very similar, I think. We both want the world to be a better place for our having been here, don’t we?”

  The world of Rachel Waring was certainly a better place for his having been there. He worked in it for ten days.

  Naturally my garden wasn’t at once what we had visualized. But it would grow. It would grow towards perfection. And even in the meantime it made a worthy extension to the house itself, which if the garden was my kingdom should logically have been my palace.

  Yet few palaces could ever have appeared so cosy—unless they came out of a picture book or animated cartoon. (In real life, for instance, could you imagine thorns and trees and brambles and creeper growing up fast and impenetrable around Buckingham Palace?) This one, like most of Disney’s, even if not quaintly turreted and gothic, was charming, intimate and friendly. In whichever part of it I found myself I never felt troubled or alone. I felt as if I had only to call out—perhaps I’d be downst
airs in the basement—and someone would hear me in the sitting room two floors above and send me back a greeting. Elsewhere, of course, I had often felt anxious and unhappy and completely on my own.

  This blessed serenity; this conviction of rightness and responsiveness... It was a nice feeling to have about one’s home.

  14

  And what had that spiteful and unhappy fairy brought to my own christening? Ah. She dealt in negatives and yet her gift was comprehensive: an inability to make the most out of my life.

  But The Sleeping Beauty had never been one of my favourite stories and I don’t know why I’d even thought of it; Prince Charming’s palace would probably have been just as pleasing. I much preferred Cinderella. And shortly before the war I’d seen a rerun of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I’d liked that, too, and told the little boy next door that someday my own prince would come; at five years old I had genuinely believed it. But Bobby was unkind. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” He laughed and pointed a grubby and derisive finger. “Not you, Rachel Waring, not you! Besides, you haven’t got a wicked stepmother,” he added a little more gently, as though this might actually be a matter for condolence.

  Some three years later, after my father had died and all the tickling had stopped, Bobby’s words came back to me. Snow White’s father had also been dead or at any rate he hadn’t seemed to be around. And in the interim, I thought, I’d really grown much prettier. My grief had made me so. Therefore I began hopefully to chant, mainly at bedtime, the mirror incantation. Of course, this hadn’t actually been Snow White’s role—but was anyone about to nitpick?

  In some ways it was almost as well that the tickling had stopped. Handsome princes didn’t usually come to maidens who were cosseted.

  Not usually. But when I was much older I hesitantly went to a party at which—although I remember it better for another and not wholly unconnected reason—a group of us was choosing the person, living or dead, whom we should most like to have been. “Grace Kelly,” I answered shyly, when eventually it came round to my turn.