A man could live without a woman. Why should he saddle himself with a wife just for the sake of being married? A woman might do that, because there was not enough in life for a woman who did not marry. Towards the end of her journey Christine dared to ask herself whether that was what she was doing.
She looked at Vinson's picture and wished violently that he were there to kiss her. She remembered the night in his hotel room when she would have stayed there with him if he had let her. Surely it was all right. She wanted to marry Vinson, with the emphasis on Vinson and not on marry.
— 162 —
She liked him better than any man she knew. He loved her and was good to her; and when he made love to her, she had for him a feeling that must surely grow into a real love as soon as they could be together all the time.
She began to get excited about seeing him. People on the boat conspired in her excitement. She sat at a table in the dining-saloon with two American couples and a desiccated English widower who was being lent to the Atomic Energy Commission. They were thrilled when she told them that she was going to be married the day after the boat docked. One of the American women said it was darling, and the other said it was the most romantic thing she had heard of since the lovely Princess was betrothed to Phillup. The American men folded their hands over their little paunches and said it was a fine thing for the cause of greater understanding between anti-Communist nations. That was not why Christine was marrying Vinson, but she felt proud.
The English scientist did not say much, but he joined with the others in calling her The Bride, and they all teased her gently and made her feel important. On the last night there was champagne and the dinner was in her honour. Everyone kept toasting her and wishing her luck, and the Americans told her what a wonderful life she was going to have, and what a clever thing she was doing in marrying an American.
She sat in the place of honour in her new white evening dress and felt happier about marrying Vinson than at any time since that Saturday evening in the kitchen at Roselawn when he had said: "Because I'm going to marry you/* and she had not denied it. She was a girl who was going to be married, a girl who was loved enough to be sent for across three thousand miles of Atlantic, and she felt that this was what she must have been waiting for all her life.
She did not sleep much that night. She woke early and
went on deck to see that the shore buildings of New Jersey were already sliding by. She did not know what she had expected America to look like. It looked big, and there seemed to be a lot of factories and oil tanks on it.
She had planned to write home about her first glimpse of the Statute of Liberty and the New York skyline, but she stayed so long in her cabin packing and doing her face and changing her mind about which suit to wear for Vinson that she missed it all.
When she went up to the promenade deck all she could see was the end of a great black shed. A rope mat hung on the corner of the concrete jetty that surrounded it, and the idea was evidently to lean the side of the liner against the mat and swivel it round into the dock. It took a long time. Nothing happened for half an hour, and Christine hung out of a window in company with other passengers who had already said goodbye to each other at breakfast and now had to fill in the anticlimax by saying it all over again.
"You're excited, I guess/' said one of the Americans, who was wearing a wide-banded hat of some consequence and an overcoat that looked as if it had been cut for a pregnant woman. "This is some day for you. Your boy friend be here to meet you?"
"He said he would. Perhaps we'll see him in a minute.** Christine leaned out of the window as a few people appeared at the open end of the shed, looking up at the liner and waving. Surely one of them would be Vinson. The pit of her stomach was hollow with suspense. It had been easy enough to look forward to seeing him during the trip, when he could not appear. Now that the moment she had been waiting for had come, she did not know how it would be. What would he look like? What should she say to him? Excitement and apprehension panicked her into a sudden wish that the liner
— 164 —
would back away from the dock and never cast her up on New York.
A sailor with a white cap and a square collar was standing among the people on the end of the jetty holding a bunch of flowers. 'Is that your young man?" the American asked. "I thought you said he was a commander/'
Christine laughed, but she was disappointed that Vinson was not there. If a sailor could wangle his way out to the jetty, why couldn't a commander? She did not know the American Navy then.
He was not there waiting with the group of people at the end of the gangway when the liner finally swung round the corner and inched up to her berth. Passengers on board were waving and calling out: "Hi, there! 0 to their friends and relations on the dock, who were wearing thinner clothes than the people who had waved the liner goodbye from England. Christine leaned out of the window and stared and searched, examining quite unlikely men, in case she was wrong and Vinson did not look like she expected.
Shipboard acquaintances kept coming up and asking to have him pointed out to them. She felt ashamed that he was not there. Perhaps they would think that she had invented the story of a fianc6 to give herself glamour. Or, what kind of a fianc6 was it, they might think, who was not standing tiptoe on the dock to greet his bride?
She felt let down and deserted. He had not come to meet her. Perhaps he was not even going to marry her. She would be stranded alone and penniless in New York, like those G.I. brides you heard about after the war, sailing out to marry men who were either in prison or already married.
In the huge, bewildering customs shed she at last found her luggage and sat on it, waiting for someone to come and help her. When an official came up he was coloured. Christine
had never spoken to a coloured man, except once when a drunken negro had tried to snatch her bag in Tottenham Court Road, and she was afraid.
Everyone round her was talking American. She could not see any of the English people who had been on the boat. When she told the customs officer what she had to declare, her voice sounded silly to her and she was afraid he would not understand what she said, but he smiled, showing the pink inside of his mouth, and Christine felt better. As he helped her to shut her bags, she told him that she did not know what to do because she could not find Vinson.
"You'll be O.K., ma'am," he said. "The party will be waiting down there."
Christine looked, and saw the crowd pressing and peering and waving beyond the wooden barrier at the end of the customs hall. Abandoning her luggage, she hurried over and stood irresolute, searching among the faces. She heard Vinson calling: "Christine!" before she could see where he was.
Suddenly he was there, right at the front of the crowd. He looked smaller than she remembered, and he wore an unfamiliar suit, a bluish sharkskin with a long double-breasted jacket which made his legs look too short; but his face was just the same and she wondered how she had ever forgotten it, and when he kissed her awkwardly across the barrier his skin smelled just as she remembered. She was safe.
She came out to him through the gate and he kissed her again and gave her a corsage of roses, which she tried unsuccessfully in her fumbling excitement to pin on to her suit. He would send a porter for her luggage. He had taken over, and everything was all right.
"Oh, Vin," she said, taking his arm as they went down to the street in the lift, "I was so worried when I couldn't see you. I thought you hadn't come to meet me."
-166-
"Not come to meet you? Not come to meet my girl"? What do you think I am, darling? YouVe got an American to look after you now/'
"Well, but/' said Christine, ignoring the slight on Englishmen, "there were people waiting on the dock. There was even an ordinary sailor, and I thought you'd be sure to be there."
"You have to wangle a pass," he said. "I don't believe in pulling rank to get these privileges. Wait here, honey, while I get the automobile."
He left her on the kerb at the edge of t
he cobbled space where taxis and cars were coming and going. Coloured porters were calling and pushing each other about like children, and policemen were stamping in the puddles, waving their arms and shouting at cars in what seemed to be a permanent state of fury. Not the hysterical, hopping fury of Paris policemen, but a resigned and bitter resentment against everything in sight, as if anyone outside the Force must be regarded as a potential criminal, from whom nothing could be expected but trouble.
The rain fell soft and straight like anywhere else in the world. A bridge-like structure of girders rose just ahead, so that Christine could see nothing of New York. It might have been Southampton or Liverpool or Calais or any dockside, and yet, even without the gaily coloured taxis which were bigger than most English cars, the coloured porters and the policemen looking as if they were extras in a gangster film, you would have known you were in New York. The very air smelled urgently of America. Christine, sensing it for the first time, recognised it with an answering urgent excitement. She was here. It was true. She was in America.
Vinson's car was a black sedan, not as dashing as the Buick he had driven in England, but still impressive by Christine's standards. He said it was only an old jalopy and they were
going to get a new one soon, but it had gears on the steering wheel and a radio and all sorts of post-war gadgets, and Christine wondered what Vinson must have thought of her father and his 1939 Vauxhall of which he was so proud.
They drove away from the docks among traffic that terrified Christine. Huge lorries as big as railway engines, in which you could not see the dwarfed river high above, bore down on them, or raced alongside, threatening to crush the car with their shining chromium sides. She tried not to show Vinson that she was frightened. Once in England, when she had flinched and gasped at a near-accident, he had said: "Don't tell me you're one of those women who panic in cars/' so she was determined not to be.
She did not want him to be disappointed in her in anything. She wanted to be what he would have been expecting while he waited for her to come to him across the Atlantic. He would have been looking forward to showing her America, and expecting her to be impressed, and so she made enthusiastic comments about everything she saw, from the dresses of women on the streets to the advertising balloon which rode in the sky, although she was still too bewildered by the noise and size of everything to take in America properly.
They swept into the Holland tunnel with a change of noise and an increase in speed, racing past the policemen immured like nuns in little glass boxes along the tiled walls.
"What do you think of this?" Vinson asked, as proudly as if he had bored the tunnel under the Hudson River himself.
"It's incredible," Christine gasped, raising her voice above the increased noise of the car. "I've never seen anything like
it."
"I thought not." He patted her hand. "I thought this would thrill you. There's so many things to show you, and I want you so much to like it all. I want you to like America."
-168-
"Oh, I do, Vin," said Christine, gazing with relief at the pinpoint of light ahead, which showed that the endless yellow tube must come to an end at last. "I think it's wonderful."
He kept asking her what she thought of America and how she liked her new country, and she kept answering that it was wonderful and she loved it, although she hardly knew yet.
Out of the tunnel, Vinson drove fast, much faster than he had in England. Christine could not object, because everything else was going at the same speed. She sat tense, clutching the edge of the seat under her skirt, so that Vinson could not see. The traffic went in three solid lines, and all the cars raced along as if they were travelling without thought for anyone else on the road. Time and again it seemed as if the black sedan must scrape the side of another speeding car, and time and again it did not. After a while she began to accept the fact that American drivers knew what they were doing — they must, if they wanted to stay alive five minutes in this traffic — and she relaxed and uncurled her fingers and stopped driving with her eyes, and sat back and looked at Vinson.
His face was set, as it always was when he was driving. His neck went straight up from his spine, and his heavy eyebrows met in a cleft of frown. Now and again he turned to smile at her, but when he turned back to the road his smile disappeared at once. He took his driving very seriously. In England that had seemed to her unnecessary. Over here, where it seemed that you had an even chance of being killed at any moment, she thought that probably he was right.
"Vin," she said, "I'll never learn to drive over here."
"Yes you will. My wife can do anything. Besides, you'll have to, if you want to go anywhere in the daytime. The buses aren't too good out in the suburbs, where we live."
Til never do it. I'll just have to sit at home and wait for you."
— 169 —
"That's a nice picture. When I'm working I'll like to think of you sitting at home,"
"What shall I be doing?" She could not visualise her married life at all.
"Well, you'll be busy around the apartment, and then there's the radio, and there'll be plenty of women neighbours for you to make friends with. There are about five hundred apartments in this development. That will be nice for you."
"Yes, I expect so." She would be like the women in magazine advertisements, having coffee in her trim kitchen with Mary Lou from next door, who had dropped in to exchange cake recipes.
Concentrating on the car, Vinson did not talk to her very much. He pointed things out for her to admire, but they were going so fast that the things had usually gone by before she could see them. She was excited when she saw her first motel, but by the time they had passed motel after motel, each bearing some unsuitable name like "Ye Olde Manor House/* or "Tumbleweed Haven,'* she began to get blas£ and was not surprised by them any more.
The traveller to America expects to be surprised, and for the first hour or so he is. But the most surprising thing about the whole country is the short time in which it ceases to surprise you. The first miles of the road are full of marvels, but too soon you become sated. You cannot be amazed any more. You find yourself sitting back and accepting without question the recurring beads of hot-dog stands, Bar-B-Qs, chromium diners, and churches topped by neon crucifixes that are strung along the necklace of the eastern seaboard roads.
By the time they stopped for lunch Christine was beginning to feel as if she had been in America all her life. She wanted to play the jukebox in the restaurant, but Vinson would not give her a nickel.
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'Why not? You're meant to play it. People must like the music, or they wouldn't have it there." As if in answer, the machine leaped into amplified life with a sobbing rendition of "You Darling/'
"There you see, Vin. Someone else has put a nickel in, and now I'll have to wait for mine. If they can do it, why can't I?"
"It was those high-school kids over there. That's all right for them. Look, Christine, this is a nice place for us to come and eat, but you and I don't play the jukebox."
"Well, I can't see why not." If he were going to put all kinds of taboos and snobberies on her in America, she might as well have stayed in England, where at least she knew what the snobberies were, without having to learn them.
It was a long drive to Washington. In England, such a mileage would have been a tremendous undertaking, with maps and tuning of the car and advice from the A.A., but over here, where the big cities were farther apart and you could average almost twice the speed, it was a mere afternoon's work.
Christine was asleep with her head on Vinson's shoulder before they got to Baltimore. He had woken her up when they were crossing the bridge over the Delaware River, and she had marvelled dutifully at its span and slept again.
She woke again when they were crawling with the traffic through endless narrow streets, where you could guess what the occupants of the houses were like by the state of their front steps. Rows and rows of thin red terrace houses, some of them with i
mitation landscapes painted on drawn blinds. Rows and rows of front doors, painted, peeling, or varnished like a coffin, with imitation graining. Set after set of four steps up from the street; some shining white, some dirtied beyond the trouble of an occasional hearthstone; some made of rickety old wood, others replaced by funereal marble; some steps
tumbling with negro babies, some a forum for a gang of small boys with pistols and eclipsing cowboy hats; one with a girl in a lavender dress waiting for a boy, or for something to happen; one with an old crone knitting; some with a dead potted plant waiting for the trash collector; some with a young couple to whom the steps were something more than the hundreds of others like them in the row.
"What town is this?"
"Baltimore. Hell of a place to drive in."
Christine raised her head, afraid that it was in his way.
"Don't take your head away. I like it there. Christine/' Vinson said, as he stopped the car at red traffic lights, 'I'm so glad you've come. IVe longed for this."
"So have I. Oh, Vin, are we really going to be married tomorrow? I can't believe it. Everyone on the boat thought it was awfully romantic to be married as soon as I arrive. And it is, isn't it?"
Her voice was dreamy, but his was practical as he answered: "It's the best thing. You'd have had to stay in a hotel otherwise, and that would be a waste of money."
"Wouldn't you have let me stay with you at the flat — apartment, I mean — even if we couldn't be married tomorrow?" Christine asked sleepily, as the lights changed to green.
"In Washington? I work there, don't forget."
"I wouldn't have minded."
"The navy would — "
"Oh, the navy — " Christine went to sleep again.
It was dusk when they came into Washington down a broad avenue that shone with streetcar lines, coloured electric signs and the strings of glaring white electric bulbs that outlined the open spaces where used cars were drawn up for sale.
The Nightingales Are Singing Page 16