Bread and Chocolate

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘D’you really think he means to marry you?’ I didn’t feel jealousy as much as a cold curiosity.

  She gave a little gasp. ‘Oh! He has to!’

  I was stunned that Philip had been such a fool. ‘You can get rid of it,’ I said baldly. ‘It’s perfectly easy. You don’t even have to stay in hospital overnight these days. Philip would certainly pay.’

  She looked at me as if I were speaking another language.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she asked.

  Then: ‘Oh! You think I am pregnant?’

  She looked deeply shocked. ‘It’s not that,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’s not that at all! I meant that he has to marry me because I love him. I love him so much,’ she said. ‘So much.’

  We looked at each other with mutual incomprehension. She knew a Philip that I had never met, although we had been friends and colleagues for three years and lovers for one. The Philip who dined with me on alternate Saturday nights and then cooked breakfast with me on Sunday mornings could not have inspired that gasp of longing. My Philip was an efficient lawyer, a cool head, a temperate lover, and a reliable friend.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she asked in simple wonderment. ‘You’ve known him so long. Don’t you feel the same about him? He’s so wonderful!’

  I shook my head. ‘But why marry?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you just live with him? If you’re so much in love.’

  She blushed scarlet as if I had said something deeply improper. ‘I don’t want to just live with him, I want to be his wife,’ she said very softly. ‘I want to never ever leave him. I want to be one of those things …’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘A monogamist.’

  They married at the Register Office on the last day of August. Bambi wore a white miniskirt the size of a little apron and a hat of white ribbon with a white spotted veil. The office had made up a collection and bought them a sherry decanter and glasses. I could not imagine that Bambi would ever serve sherry from a decanter; but I donated my five pounds perfectly pleasantly. Philip had made his choice and I hoped, but I did not expect, that they would be happy. They honeymooned in Greece.

  Bambi never came back to work, she was busy at their new home. She wanted to start a family at once. She was making curtains, painting walls. Philip came to the office with a streak of white gloss in his hair and laughed when someone commented on it. For a month he looked like a man half-drunk. He laughed easily, he walked faster, he left the office earlier every day as if he could not wait to go home. He was sentimental about court cases, especially those involving young women. He suggested that we pay all the clerks more. He irritated all of us unspeakably.

  It didn’t last. By autumn his tan and his look of incredulous joy had both faded. I wondered what it was like for him, to go home to Bambi when he was tired and irritable from a difficult day in court, wanting someone to talk it over with, and finding instead a pretty child in paint-stained leggings wanting him to go out and get fish and chips for supper.

  He had agreed that they should have the baby she wanted. But she did not conceive easily. He never mentioned it but Bambi herself telephoned me once or twice and said that the nursery was painted, the ducks stencilled on the walls and the carpet laid down, but no baby was on the way.

  Then, six months after the marriage, on a wintry grey February day she came into my office looking pale and drawn. A Bambi lost in the cold snow.

  ‘Can you do me a divorce, Miss Cook?’

  I have trained myself to look calm and impassive but I think my jaw must have dropped. ‘Bambi?’

  Her rosebud mouth drooped. ‘Can you do me a divorce, please? I don’t want to be married any more.’

  I straightened my pens beside my blotter. ‘Why d’you want a divorce, Bambi?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘He doesn’t love me any more,’ she said simply. ‘He’s cross all the time. He just kind of stopped loving me. I don’t know why. I’m just the same, I think, but he has changed. He doesn’t want me any more.’

  I compressed my lips on my irritation. ‘This doesn’t sound like a job for a lawyer,’ I said as patiently as I could manage. ‘You must talk this through with Philip. People often have difficulties in the first years of marriage. You have to get used to each other, you have to adapt. You have to give and take.’

  All the old clichés flowed easily enough; but Bambi’s fair head just dropped lower and lower. When I finally finished she looked up at me. ‘It’s not like that for us,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It’s not working at it and give and take for us.’

  I had forgotten how irritating she could be. I uncapped my fountain pen which in the old days, when she had been Bambi the new temp, had been a clear signal for her to leave.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Bambi. But I do know that you will have to talk this through with Philip. You must explain to him how you are feeling, and then he will tell you if he has any difficulties, and then you must work together and resolve them. Then, if you cannot reach an agreement, after you have really tried, you must find another firm to handle your affairs.’

  She was not listening to me. She shook her fair head with a strange childish stubbornness. ‘We got married for love,’ she said. ‘Not many people do that, you know. They think they do, but most people get married because they know each other really well, or because they’re used to each other, or because they’re afraid they can’t get anyone better. Or because they like doing things together. But we got married because we were madly in love. Madly.’

  I waited. None of this made any sense at all.

  ‘So when we stopped being in love,’ she glanced at me, ‘madly in love … there was nothing else.’

  ‘What d’you mean, nothing else?’

  She gave that sad little shrug again. ‘We aren’t friends, we don’t like the same things. We don’t do the same things. We don’t even like the same food …’

  I thought of Bambi’s cream cheese sandwich lunches and fish and chip suppers, and Philip’s preference for the best restaurants and the most elaborate service.

  ‘So now he’s not in love any more there’s nothing to hold us together,’ she said. ‘There’s no … glue.’

  ‘Glue?’

  ‘People marry for love but they stay together because it works for them,’ she said, a wise child. ‘They own things together and they do things together. They have children together and they bring them up together. People who marry their friends have thousands of things to do together and to talk about. But for us, there’s nothing. All there was ever was being in love. And now that’s gone … there’s no glue.’

  ‘Perhaps you can make love come back?’ I suggested, sounding, even to myself, like an advice columnist of the most romantic type.

  Bambi shook her little head again. ‘Not love like that,’ she said. ‘Not mad love. When that’s gone, it’s gone forever. That’s why I want you to do me a divorce.’

  I pulled my legal notepad towards me. When she had worked in the office we had called her Bambi the Bimbo behind her back, and once or twice it had slipped out and someone had called her Bambi the Bimbo to her face. She had not minded. She had smiled that appealing defiant little smile and tossed her blonde head. ‘I might be thick; but I’m cute,’ she had said last summer.

  Only now when I agreed to represent her for her divorce did I realise that she was wiser than I. She was wiser than Philip. She knew when something had started and she knew when it was over.

  ‘I’m still glad I did it,’ she said. She had her tiny handkerchief out and she blew her nose in it. ‘It’s good to be in love madly – just once in your life. Even if it can never last. Isn’t it, Miss Cook?’

  But I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

  The Playmate

  She leaned forward against the constraint of the seat belt. ‘I can remember it from here,’ she said. ‘The trees make a tunnel, a tunnel of green. When I was a little girl we used to sing from here …’ Sh
e sang ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree …’ and broke off with a self-conscious giggle.

  ‘But surely your home was always London?’

  Imogen shook her head. ‘We lived there – but I called Sussex my home.’

  ‘And did you come down every weekend?’ He was curious about her childhood, with that fey talented mother and the dull stockbroker father. The house in the suburbs had been the father’s house, furnished in his style; but the little cottage belonged to the mother. The father hated the little terraced farmworker’s cottage set back from a mud lane in a row of red brick, sprawling with roses and hollyhocks. He stayed away while the mother, a difficult, attractive woman, had furnished it eccentrically in a ragbag mixture of colours and patterns. She brought her easel and her paints and her little girl almost every weekend in summer, and once or twice – rich rare events – in wintertime too.

  ‘Once it even snowed,’ she said. ‘And we went tobogganing on the Downs. I had a tin tray.’

  ‘Your mother tobogganed?’ he asked incredulously. She was dead now, a thin beautiful woman always wearing velvet in rich deep colours. She was old by the time he had met her. He had gone to her elegant London flat to interview her and fallen at once under her spell. Greatly daring, he had asked her if she would come out for dinner. She had looked at him long and hard – that deep dark blue provocative look of hers. ‘I don’t dine with young men any more. You had much better take Imogen.’

  He had taken the daughter to please her – and to secure himself another invitation. Then it was a pattern; he would have tea with the mother and talk about art and criticism and gossip, and then he would take her quiet daughter out for dinner. He could not have said what made the older woman so seductive. It was not her beauty – though much of it still endured in the flirtatious turn of her head and the deep secretive blue eyes. It was not her wit, though she had an acid tongue and a fund of stories which made him laugh and long to have been part of her circle when she was the darling of the cosmopolitan art world. It was more the sheer female power of her. There was something toe-curlingly seductive about her, there was something that made you want to both tenderly cradle and powerfully crush her.

  Imogen had inherited none of her mother’s appeal. ‘Dear little Midge,’ he thought tenderly. He liked to think of her as she had been all those years ago – a little girl unsubdued by her mother’s beauty and talent, sledging on a tea tray on the gentle slopes of the South Downs.

  ‘Did you play alone?’

  Midge glowed. ‘No. I had a friend in Sussex, a special friend, my very own friend.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Not she. A boy. He came to do the garden, John Daws.’ She smiled. ‘Mother called him Jack – jackdaw you see. He was supposed to dig the garden but he used to play all day with me. Mother said she was hiring a gardener, not a nursemaid, but we didn’t care. He would take me down to the stream to fish, or we would go and see the sheep or the calves. He let me bring the cows in for milking and play in the dairy, he took me to the mill to see the corn grinding. He let me slide down the chute for the grain and caught me at the bottom!’

  ‘Your mother let you play with a farm boy?’ He had to readjust his view of her. He would have thought her too fiercely protective of her daughter to let the little girl out without supervision. He would have thought her too snobbish to welcome a friendship with a farm boy.

  ‘She used to say to him, “Fly away, Jackdaw!” – but then she always let him stay for tea. He would sit on the chair nearest the door and watch Mother make my tea. He would jump up all the time to fetch things for her, lift things for her. Mother liked to do her own cooking in Sussex, it was like a playhouse for her.’

  ‘He came every day?’

  ‘Every single day. Some days we all went out together, we’d take a picnic and he would carry Mother’s easel and her paints. We’d go to the stream and the two of us would play while Mother painted. When it was wet we laid out a city out of bricks and cards on the floor and Mother sketched us while we played.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘He was halfway between us!’ she exclaimed. ‘He was ten years older than me, and ten years younger than mother. I thought that was very special. I was seven, he was seventeen and Mother was twenty-seven.’

  ‘And how old was your father?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Oh, we never thought about Father. I don’t know. He was older – perhaps forty. You know how it is when you’re a child. Everyone is either your playmate or a grown-up.’

  ‘And John Daws was your playmate?’

  She was suddenly serious. ‘He was my friend, the only friend I ever had.’

  ‘Have you kept in touch?’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘I never saw him after I started boarding school. I started at twelve, and then Mother’s work got so popular that people kept inviting her for the summer: the Riviera, or grouse shooting in Scotland one year.’ She gave an unconscious shiver. ‘That was dreadful. All loud men and tall women and dead birds! Acres of tiny feathered bodies at the end of every day. More than anyone could ever eat.’

  ‘Did you never come down to Sussex again?’

  ‘She kept promising me … but then she was ill, and Father rented the cottage out to pay for the nurses.’

  ‘So you never said goodbye to John Daws?’

  ‘We were children,’ she said firmly. ‘We didn’t need to say good-bye. At the end of each weekend he’d just say, “See you next week then”, and I’d just say “Yes”. He’d look at Mother and she would smile at him, then he’d tip his cap and go.’ She was watching the way the light flickered through the tall beeches on to the road. ‘This is the long hill,’ she said. ‘D’you know, I dream about it still.’

  ‘You must have forgotten him when you went to school,’ he suggested. ‘You must have made some friends at school.’

  Imogen shook her head. The sunlight flickering through the trees gilded her brown hair and then threw her into shadow. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t like the other girls and I didn’t know how to learn. They knew about boys and clothes and pop music and I only wanted to get back to Sussex and Jacky Daws.’ She hesitated. ‘I was lonely.’

  ‘Didn’t you boast about him? You could have called him your boyfriend.’

  ‘I wasn’t that stupid!’ she exclaimed. ‘They would never have understood. They would have turned it into something ugly. He was private. He was my childhood friend, my only friend. I’ve never told anyone but you. You are the first friend I had since I lost him. I’ve never been back until now.’

  ‘I hope it isn’t going to be a disappointment,’ he cautioned. ‘John Daws will be grown up, they may have put a housing estate on your little village green.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’ll be the same,’ she said. ‘And Jackdaw will be there, just the same.’

  He said nothing, watching the road as they breasted the hill and gathered speed down the other side. The road was lined now with thick clumps of coppiced chestnut bushes, as impenetrable as jungle. The trees were a bright rich green. He felt the townsman’s unease at the lush fertility of the place.

  ‘Shall you mind if he is married?’ he asked. ‘Will he mind that you are engaged to me?’

  She was shocked. ‘We were children! It wasn’t like that! He was my Jacky Daws. He used to wait for us to come by the lane end and when the car came round the corner he would jump up on the big running boards and laugh. He was reckless and quick and curly-headed and he would jump up on the car and laugh when Mother screamed. She always screamed a little bit – as a game. Then when we came in the house we would find the fire laid and ready to light and the tea all ready and she would say, “Oh Jackdaw! you are my treasure, my treasure!”’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then we’d have tea and he would take me out. We’d go and see the pheasant chicks which his father was rearing, or a bottle-fed lamb in his mother’s kitchen. We went on a long expedition to a barn and sa
w a barn owl’s nest one night, we didn’t get back till after dark.’

  ‘Wasn’t your mother worried?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not when I was with Jackdaw. And then I would go up to bed and I would hear them talking softly, so as not to wake me. It was lovely falling asleep in the little boxroom with the window open, and the smell of the flowers blowing in, and their voices whispering quietly in the room below. Sometimes he would not leave until the stars were out and the moon was shining, and I would hear them murmuring together, like sleepy wood pigeons cooing.’

  ‘You loved him,’ he said flatly.

  She paused for a moment. ‘He was the only person to ever make me feel important. No-one else really saw me. It was always Mother. It was always Mother that everybody loved. But Jackdaw was my friend. Just mine.’

  ‘Until me,’ he prompted.

  She nodded. ‘Until you.’

  He wondered why the landscape seemed familiar: the easy arable country of mid-Sussex, the hedges thick with flowers and rich with bird life, the fields green with a colourwash of yellow. He realised he knew it from the mother’s paintings. He had seen these fields, these very fields, a dozen times under a dozen different skies, in different lights. She had a great gift of making the most prosaic scene into an enchanted world. The shadow of a cloud on growing corn, the speckle of scarlet from poppies on a verge, all combined to give the impression of strangeness and yet familiarity. She had been a powerful painter, a seductive painter. He wished he had known her when she was twenty-seven as the farm boy had known her. He felt that if he had known her then, he would never have recovered. As it was, knowing her when she was old and facing her death, she had woven a spell around him. She had enchanted him.

  ‘Right here,’ her daughter said.

  He signalled and turned the wheel and they were at once engulfed in the deep sweet-smelling green of a beech wood. She wound down the window and air blew in colder and damp.

  ‘The river is at the bottom of this hill,’ she said. ‘We used to fish.’