by Marie Joseph
But up in the cotton town where he’d spent most of his childhood men who danced were pansies, and so he’d gone none too willingly to his father’s old university, escaping from there into a war that for him had ended all too soon with the Armistice.
Flying gave him the glamour his extroverted nature craved. With his white silk scarf knotted nonchalantly round his neck, wearing his flying togs, he came, as they said in Lancashire, ‘into his own’. Not knowing the meaning of fear, he thrived on it as some men thrived on hard work. What was irking him now was the dull routine of flying newspapers from one European capital to another. If he could have come to the theatre dressed in his flying helmet he would have basked in the attention from the girls. When he’d read an article that said flying aeroplanes was the most dangerous occupation there was for a man, his chest had actually swelled. Some day he’d decided, in the not too distant future, he would show the world his mastery of his flying machine by night-flying passengers distances unheard of in the commercial field. He would personally shrink distances, so that his name made headlines in all the papers. He would be a legend, recognized everywhere he went by adoring crowds hanging on to his every utterance. And if some flyer with the money to back him didn’t get there first, he’d fly the Atlantic solo from east to west. It was being talked of already, and he knew it could be done.
In the meantime, he had long since discovered how attractive he was to women. Mannequins, show girls, all of them a sop to his ego, but not one of them as beautiful and famous as his new bride. Listening to her singing now, almost sensing the audience catching their breaths, he blessed the day he’d found her. Marrying her that morning had given him the chance to live vicariously in the charmed aura of her success. Marrying her had been the stroke of luck he could never have envisaged.
He hadn’t been able to understand the firm stand Clara had made during their brief engagement against any form of lovemaking apart from kisses and cuddling. He couldn’t understand how that scruff Joe West had succeeded where he had undoubtedly failed. But if she wanted to behave like the virgin she wasn’t, so be it. His patience would be rewarded.
Clara sensed the difference in him when she came off stage after her last song at the end of the evening’s performance. His hand on her back burned through her dress, and in her dressing room he kicked the door to behind him and pulled her close up against him. She felt the hardness of him and when he kissed her it was in a different way. So different she struggled for a moment, revulsion sweeping through her.
Forcing her lips apart he thrust his tongue into her mouth. Holding her fiercely to him he ground his body into hers. Still bemused by the rapturous applause of the audience, drained by the emotion she always put into her singing, she wasn’t ready for the immediate switch to passion, and her whole being cried out against it.
Surfacing from the kiss which seemed to go on for ever, she began to talk nervously. ‘Have you ever seen so many flowers? Look, John, they’ve been arriving all day.’ Ignoring the mulish expression on his handsome face, she picked up a card attached to an enormous display of dark red roses. ‘These,’ she told him, ‘are from Bart. He must have cabled the order from America.’ Taking a single rose, she held it for a moment against a flushed cheek. ‘He’s forgiven me for not going with him. I really let him down, you know. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to make a stand. He isn’t an easy man to cross.’
‘It’s time we went home, Clara.’ Almost snatching the rose from her, John pushed it roughly back into the vase. ‘Come on, love. Let’s escape now before they all come in expecting another party.’ He glanced at the bottles of champagne cooling in the row of fire buckets. ‘We’ll slip away. It’s been a long day, and they’ll understand.’
His eyes had darkened again. In another minute he was going to kiss her. Clara’s heartbeats quickened. But not like that. Oh, please not like that … She stared at him, at the hectic flush staining his cheeks, and in that moment he seemed like a stranger. There was no familiar laughter in his eyes, no teasing; his grip on her arm as he urged her towards the door made her wince with pain.
‘I can’t go like this.’ Wrenching her arm away, she stood rubbing the place where his nails had dug into her soft skin. ‘Not without my cloak, and without … some of the flowers.’
In one single movement it seemed John snatched her cloak from a chair, draped it round her shoulders, and thrust the nearest bouquet of flowers into her arms – the roses.
In the back of the taxi they dripped water from their long stems onto his trousers. When he tried to take them from her she shook her head, holding them to her like a shield. In the flat the first thing she did was to put them in water again, conscious of the fact that John was behind her in the high-ceilinged sitting room, taking off his jacket, unbuttoning his waistcoat before sitting down in Dora’s chair to unlace his shoes.
‘I took your case through into the bedroom when it came round this morning,’ she whispered, reluctant to move away from the heady scent of the roses. ‘Would you like a drink of something? Or are you hungry? It’s a long time since you’ve eaten. They’d sent in sandwiches to go with the champagne.’ Her voice faltered at the expression on his face. ‘I could have brought some with us, that is if you’re …’
‘Come here, Clara.’
She walked towards him slowly, every step a conscious effort. What was wrong with her? This man was her husband. She had promised, in the sight of God that very day, to love and obey him for as long as they both lived. It was just that – it had come to her in the taxi ride from the theatre – that, because of Joe, he imagined she knew what to expect. Even knew what to do.
And she could never tell him that when Joe had taken her she had been hardly more than a child. That she had hardly known what she was doing. That she had never gone through the adolescent yearnings of wanting to understand her own feelings, her own body, the way she now knew other girls did. Those dreaming searching years had been stolen from her by a father who rocked himself by the fire, nursing a crippled hand. When other girls had been out ‘ladding’ on the wide road leading to the Corporation Park, she had been working both at home and in that basement room, keeping her father from starvation.
And Joe … He’d been comfort, not what this man holding out his arms to her imagined. John was cupping her face in his hands now, amber eyes glittering as he looked down at her. It was too late to say all the things Clara knew she should have said, too late to try to make him understand that really, for her, it was the first time.
After the kiss, holding nothing of tenderness in its searching passion, John spoke to her in a voice rough and alien with the force of his longing. ‘You go through and get into bed. I’ll smoke a cigarette before I join you.’
She had no idea what it cost him to say that. But in her long white dress, with her pale gold hair hanging loose, with her green eyes filled with what a man would have to have been a fool not to recognize as fear, John’s better nature asserted itself. If she wanted to be wooed on her wedding night like some tremulous virgin, then so be it. If she wanted a Prince Charming, he could play that game too.
‘But hurry up, darling,’ he whispered, striking a match for his cigarette with a hand that trembled. ‘I’ve waited a long time for this moment.’
When he walked swiftly into the bedroom she was kneeling by the bed, wearing a high-necked nightdress, hands folded as she said her prayers. For a second the shutters opened wide on an almost forgotten childhood. He remembered his mother standing by his side to hear him say his nightly prayer: ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy and all my friends at school. And make me into a good boy. For Jesus Christ’s sake, Amen.’
The memory held him still, then, as Clara turned her head, he went to her, lifting her onto the bed. Tearing at his clothes in his haste to be rid of them, he got in beside her, drawing her to him, the desire kept in check for so long flooding through him, so that all control vanished.
It was over so quickly that Clara couldn’t believ
e it His weight on her had been suffocating, his feverish words of love lost in the tangle of her long hair. She sensed his hurt manly vanity as he held her, promising it would be better next time. And when it happened again, and it wasn’t, she lay awake with him sleeping soundly beside her, wondering why men seemed to like so much what they did.
He woke at five in the morning, and though she closed her eyes and willed herself to cooperate and be a part of him, she felt more alone than she had ever felt in the whole of her nineteen years.
‘Oh, darling,’ he whispered later, and the light seeping through the drawn curtains showed her his handsome face with a golden stubble of beard on his chin. He was watching her with an expression compounded of love and triumph, tinged with gratitude.
‘You’re so wonderful,’ he whispered. ‘One day everyone in London will know your name. The lights of Piccadilly will seem to dim beside it. When you sing I’ll be there watching them watching you, knowing you are singing for me.’ He placed a hand on her thigh. ‘And knowing you belong to me.’
‘I’m cold without my nightie,’ she told him, feeling peevish and mean, yet immediately regretting her words as he pulled her tightly up against him, massaging her all over with hard rubbing movements.
When they walked into the Home much later than planned, with Clara carrying the roses for Dora, it was obvious that in that first telling moment Dora was struggling to remember just who they could be.
Clara smiled at the old woman, a soft warm smile. ‘It’s me. Clara,’ she whispered. ‘How are you, Dora?’
Bart had been right. Gradually over the past few weeks Dora had slipped further into senility. Her face was still made up as if for the stage, her dress as befrilled and colourful as ever, but as she lowered her head Clara was saddened to see the wide white parting in the brightly hennaed hair. In the large, sunny lounge chairs were arranged round the walls, as if their occupants were at a ball waiting for the band to strike up and partners to glide towards them to ask if they could have the first dance. Half the women were asleep, white heads nodding over spade-flat chests, walking sticks looped over the backs of their chairs.
‘Who’s that man?’ Dora’s voice had lost none of its power as she glared at John squatting on his heels by a wheelchair, charming an old lady into a fit of giggles.
Clara knelt down and took Dora’s hand. ‘You know who that is, you old fraud. It’s John. We got married yesterday, and I wished more than anything that you could have been there.’
‘To see you married to him?’ Dora had changed suddenly into a frail birdlike creature with a plaintive wobble in her voice. ‘He’s not young Mr Boland, is he?’ Her faded eyes filled with a bleak watery despair. ‘He’s the one you should have married, little chuck. He would’ve known how to make you happy.’
‘I am happy.’ Clara patted the twisted hand lying so passively in her own, then made the mistake of talking to Dora as if she were a child, soothing her with comforting words. ‘Mr Boland has a wife already, dear.’
‘Not any more, he’s not!’ Dora’s indignation flared in her eyes, the woman she had been not so long ago taking over from the quavering one of a few seconds earlier. ‘Divorced, that’s what Mr Boland is, with his wife getting custody of his two children. Poor man.’
‘Mr Boland is in America.’ Clara glanced across the room at John, still holding his captive audience of one spellbound. ‘That’s the man I’m married to, Dora. You’re getting a bit mixed up today, dear.’
‘I’m never mixed up!’ Dora’s voice deepened to a growl. ‘And don’t call me “dear”. You never used to. It makes me feel old.’
As John came over she was asleep with the suddenness of a stone dropping down a well, hands twitching at the rug over her knees. Before he could speak she was awake once again, glaring at him from beneath heavily penciled-in eyebrows, one at least a quarter of an inch longer than the other.
‘Is this your son?’ she shouted to the old woman in the wheelchair. ‘I thought you said he never came to see you? Does he peroxide his hair?’
‘That’s the last time we’re coming here.’ Holding Clara firmly by an elbow, John almost marched her to the door. He shuddered. ‘If that’s what growing old is like, then, please God, let me die young.’
Twisting away from him, Clara turned round to see Dora crying silently, her mouth wide open in a wail of incomprehension. Drawing her arm from her husband’s grip, she spoke quickly, the expression in her green eyes daring him to interfere.
‘I can’t leave her like this. She’s all confused, and it’s the knowing she’s confused that’s killing her. Wait for me outside. I have to talk to her again.’
His footsteps sounded very loud on the beef-tea-coloured oilcloth of the passage leading to the heavy front doors. Clara’s lips tightened for a moment; then in a few swift steps she was back at Dora’s side, kneeling down to look into the ravaged face with the tears running down past the corners of the gaping mouth. The lace-edged handkerchief she used to mop up Dora’s tears came away stained with yellow ochre face powder and coral rouge.
‘Don’t cry, Dora.’ Clara dabbed at the trembling chin. ‘See, you’re making me cry too.’ She watched as Dora moved her head sideways, like a child refusing to be comforted. ‘I love you, Dora.’ Clara willed understanding back into the vague expression. ‘If I do it quietly, would you like me to sing for you?’
It was a strange thing to say. Clara acknowledged that, but in that moment it was all she had to offer, that and the love she felt for this old woman with approaching death written plain on her grotesquely made-up face.
But suddenly Dora was asleep again, the organdie frills on her purple blouse rising and falling with the hoarse rattle of her breathing. Getting to her feet, Clara kissed the crown of the bowed head with its ring of undyed hair showing like a bald patch. She walked quickly out into the passageway, unable to bear any more.
John was outside waiting for her, smoking with fierce impatient puffs. When he saw her he threw the cigarette away, flicking it over a rhododendron bush before pulling her into his arms.
‘I’m sorry, love.’ He was all contrition as he stared down into her troubled face. ‘I’m not very good with old sick people. Maybe I saw too much of it when I was a small boy and my mother used to take me with her on some of her sick-visiting.’ His finger traced the contours of Clara’s mouth, and she knew he was trying to apologize. ‘Old age will come to me and to you,’ he said. ‘But not yet. Not for a long, long time yet, my darling.’ He glanced back at the red-brick building. ‘Being reminded of it, of the way we’ll be some day, makes me feel physically ill. Old age isn’t dignified. It’s pathetic, it’s cruel, it’s a lingering on this earth with one foot already deep in the grave.’
Clara shook her head. ‘No, you’re wrong, quite wrong. There is a dignity there if you look for it, if you listen for it. Very old people have a lot of wisdom.’
To her amazement John’s face flushed a deep angry red. ‘Just for once, love, just once look straight on at things the way they are. Not through a veil of sentimentality. Wake up, Clara! That religion of yours has blanked your mind to reality. Your thinking is archaic!’ He lifted her feet clear of the ground, swinging her round so that she gave a small scream of protest. ‘They were all potty in there! If they were dogs they’d have been put down long ago.’ As he set her down his eyes blazed into hers. ‘When it’s my turn to go, give me a good clean death, spiralling down out of a bright blue sky. One big slam, then nothing. That’s the way to go.’
Walking down the long winding path his mood changed with a speed that left Clara in a state of bewilderment. He actually whistled softly to the rhythm of their steps. She glanced sideways at the handsome face, the wide forehead, the straight nose exactly the right shape for the perfect balance of the classical features. In spite of his recent outburst John walked at ease with himself, obviously assuming that her mood matched his own.
‘You feeling all right?’ At the kerb he stopped, searching
the length of the tree-lined road for a cruising taxi cab. ‘You look quite pale, love.’
‘I’m wondering if I’m really as sanctimonious as you say.’ For the first time in years Clara used a swearword. ‘And it’s a fine time to go talking about bloody dying on the day after our wedding. That’s wrong thinking if anything is.’
There on the pavement John hugged her close, throwing his head back and laughing as if he were coming apart at the seams. ‘You don’t know how funny that sounded, coming from you. I didn’t know you knew words like that.’
‘And plenty more.’ Clara joined in his laughter. ‘When I was little me and Walter West were the best swearers in our class.’
A gleaming taxi came bowling along towards them and John stepped out into the road waving his arms as if he were doing semaphore.
In the back seat of the cab he put his arm round her, pulling her close and dislodging her hat. ‘We’ve got all afternoon to ourselves,’ he whispered softly into her hair.
Closing her eyes, Clara leaned into his shoulder. It was going to be so easy to make him happy. She’d noticed before how he shied away from any form of unpleasantness. Next time she visited Dora she would go by herself. John was so young really, and maybe she’d lived too long with sadness. First with her father’s depression after his hand got smashed, then with Dora, who for the past two years had lived wholly in the past. It was time she relaxed and just let herself be loved. And the other thing … well, she’d get used to it, maybe even get to like it in time. Opening her eyes, she saw a young woman pushing a pram with a baby sitting bolt upright at either end and a toddler clinging to her skirt as she waited to cross the road.
Other women obviously put up with it and didn’t seem to mind. And it certainly wasn’t a thing you could ask anyone about, or seek advice. Perhaps the discomfort and the disappointment at the speed with which it was over were natural and would right themselves in time?