Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  ‘But you said … Well, never mind, Gran, but the point is that I simply can’t marry this chap because he’s—well, you see, he’s really got a girl of his own already, a gorgeous ranee or sari or whatever they call it, back home in where-ever-it-is. So you see, I thought,’ said Rosie desperately, ‘that perhaps you might possibly lend me a hundred pounds or so and then I could get something—well, some sort of pills or something, only they’re frightfully expensive, and then I needn’t have the baby at all.…’

  But a terrible storm had suddenly blown up and the waves in the garden were lashed to fury by the whistling wind blowing down from the Swiss Alps, and it was necessary to jettison the contents of Mrs. Evans’ room immediately—out of the front window, this time, on to the garage drive. The neighbours, who were used to a sudden descent of household linen and infrangible objets d’art, took it all in good part and merely remarked that old Mrs. Evans was having one of her turns again; but a gathering crowd of passers-by remained to stare and a small boy improvised a commando raid. Rosie, flying downstairs to rouse the household and warn off the marauders, sadly acknowledged that she was a fool to have forgotten that one could never get anywhere positive with Gran before flood or fire or earthquake intervened; and that it would be useless to try again. Only one chance remained to her and a pitifully small one it was likely to turn out to be. But he had got a couple of hundred pounds in the bank, she knew, and he had been in love with her for years and years.… She must tell Damien.

  So Rosie told Damien.

  Damien lived with his mother who kept a terribly superior sort of lodging house somewhere off behind Kilburn, almost far enough up to be called St. John’s Wood, and not very far from the Evans menage in Maida Vale which, unlike Damien’s mother, they frankly called Maida Vale. He had been on and off in love with Rosie since she had been a tiny thing with yellow pigtails in the kindergarten of his little-boy school in the country, years ago. More off than on, of course, since he had become a serious, though not very well-informed, Communist, and realized how deeply involved her family was in bloated capitalism. Old Twm, Thomas Evans’ grandfather, had had interests in coal, grinding the blackened faces of the miners, though from a decent distance which did seem to make a difference when one remembered—and couldn’t help loving the memory of—Old Twm. But Twm had died years ago, and then what had happened to the money? Passed on by inheritance, by inheritance, mark you, and not a hand’s turn done to earn it, except of course by Old Twm who, having so earned it, had had the idiotic idea that he might use it as he would, even to the education and advancement of his only son, young Twm. But young Twm, had not lived to enjoy it, but very deservedly had been killed off during the first world war; leaving it all to his own son Thomas who had invested it in a medical training and was now living very comfortably on the proceeds. It was true that Thomas Evans had never ‘gone on and specialized’ because the famous fortune had, in fact, been less than enough when it came to providing a home for his sister and for his widowed grandmother who was slowly and delightfully going off her nut; but there it was, they all lived in comfort and happiness; founded upon—what? That sorry old story of laugh, clown, laugh, smiling nigger-minstrel faces that had concealed exploited and aching hearts. Damien’s mother, upon attaining widowhood had not, it was true, immediately distributed her legacy among the workers whose horny hands had accumulated it for her; but then she had not let it just lie fallow in the bank but had sunk it (and sunk was right!) in her ‘house’ and now worked herself to skin and bone, lying on a sofa directing the activities of a host of little old women who came in at odd hours of the day and were referred to collectively as ‘my wretched staff’. Moreover, it had not been a success. They didn’t live in comfort (and neither did their lodgers) like the family in the shabby, but indisputably Regency house in Maida Vale, careless about money and, if not actually extravagant, at least not saving of pennies and tuppences and cockle-edged threepenny bits.… Somehow, even where principle was involved, it did make a difference to right and wrong—whether the result were failure or success.

  But as for Rosie, petted and spoiled and entirely dependent upon the shameful inheritance.… ‘What have you ever done, Rosie, for the Community, that entitles you to all this gadding about with a whole lot of worthless Frenchmen in France?’

  ‘Geneva’s in Switzerland, ackcherly,’ said Rosie. ‘Not France.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you knew even that before you went Abroad,’ said Damien, ‘so you’ve learnt something, even if it’s only a bit of geography.’

  Rosie replied with truth that she had learnt a great deal, most of it unconnected with geography.

  ‘Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that you contribute absolutely nothing to the State as a whole.’ Damien contributed to the State as a whole from a desk in a city office where all day long he jotted down and totted up figures in the shifting columns of wealth in the despised capitalist country which so patiently suffered him.

  ‘Well, it’s not my fault if I haven’t got a job. Damn it all, I’ve only this minute left school.’

  ‘Many girls in this country leave school at the age of fourteen.’

  ‘I wish I could have,’ said Rosie. ‘I simply loathed that old St. Hilda’s.’

  ‘God knows they didn’t teach you anything worth learning.’

  ‘They didn’t teach me anything at all,’ said Rosie. ‘They couldn’t, poor things, I was too dumb.’

  ‘Well, there’s no room in the world to-day for helpless drones.’

  Rosie didn’t want to be a drone at all, she was simply dying, ackcherly, to get a job as a model at Paquin or somewhere like that. But if she couldn’t, well, what could they do about it? They couldn’t just have her painlessly destroyed, now could they? She wondered if, as a drone mother-to-be, she might fit in more comfortably with Damien’s uncomfortable ideas. ‘I say, Day—I wanted to talk to you about something. Well, I mean it’s about—better say a friend of mine, and the thing is, she’s—well, matter of fact, she’s going to have a baby.’

  ‘Ah—Unmarried Mother?’ said Damien with a brightening eye.

  ‘Well, yes, she certainly isn’t married, but if she could help it, she would like not to be a mother either.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Damien. ‘Women have a right to motherhood if they want it. You tell her to stick to her guns.’

  ‘The trouble is, they’re not so much her guns,’ said Rosie, uneasily, ‘as more of a sort of pistol to her head. I mean, she believes madly in marriage and all those—um—outworn shibboleths, Damien, because if you don’t well—well, you never get married, do you?’

  ‘Then I’ve got no patience with her,’ said Damien. ‘She shouldn’t have given herself to her man, if she was unprepared for the burden—as things now are—of single parenthood.’

  ‘He wasn’t her man, exactly. He was someone she—well, he was in a train, ackcherly, and there she was, she was absolutely terrified, she was young and unsophisticated and all that, and she just got scared and lost her head.…’

  ‘All the better. Those are the children we want, children not born into the shackles of the old conventions, children who can start out from the very beginning free to believe in the—er—the freedoms; I mean free to believe in equality—and—and tolerance and—well, all those things,’ said Damien, running out of freedoms; he was not a quick study, poor boy, and all too frequently fluffed or forgot his lines; nor was he adept at striking out on his own.

  ‘Oh, lor’!’ said Rosie, gloomily.

  ‘So give your friend a jolly good pat on the back from Us, and tell her to come along to a meeting we’re having at my place next Thursday. After all, one never knows,’ said Damien, waxing enthusiastic upon visions, ‘what her Unborn Child may yet turn out to be. But she isn’t one of your French friends, is she?’ he added, breaking off a little anxiously. Everybody knew what those French girls were!

  ‘No, no, she’s English. Ackcherly,’ said Rosie, nervously, �
�you know her quite well.’ She added that her—er—lover had been French. In fact, he was still on the continent now, which was one of the troubles.…

  ‘You’d think these Frogs would be up to all the dodges and not land themselves in these messes, wouldn’t you?’ said the advocate for unmarried motherhood.

  So there was nothing left for it. Rosie told Melissa.

  Melissa was the daughter of a rather old old girl at Matilda’s convent school; and Matilda, who was habitually more kind than she was sensible, gave her a small salary and the use of the flat in the basement of the house in Maida Vale, in consideration of some help in the kitchen and attendance upon old Mrs. Evans. She was a thin, nervous girl with a crowning glory of curly nut-brown hair, of which one lock was for ever falling forward over her right eye to the infinite irritation of all beholders and the great satisfaction of Melissa herself, who practised in the looking-glass tossing her head back and immediately letting the lock fall forward again. At twenty-two, she remained an adolescent; unloving and unloved, introspective, dissatisfied, tortured with uncertainty about her future should she fail to ‘get married’. Men and marriage were indeed, and rightly, all she ever thought about, and she was consumed with envy for the careless rapture of Rosie’s easy-going carryings-on; so much so that even the guilelessly unsuspecting heart of Miss Evans had been vaguely aware that all between them was not entirely well. Now, however, bereft of other friends, she was forced back upon Melissa’s mercy, and she curled herself up on the rather grubby off-white cushions on the divan in the basement flat and asked with elaborate carelessness if Melissa happened to know of a nice, cheap, quackified abortionist. ‘Because it’s too boring, but I seem to have gone and got myself in the family way. These Continentals are so ardent, aren’t they? There’s no resisting them.’

  Melissa had spent a couple of terms at a convent in Brussels and on the strength of it wrote her sevens with little dashes through them and was frequently at a loss for the English word; but her experience with ‘Continentals’ was absolutely nil, as indeed—though not for want of increasingly desperate trying as she approached her twenty-third year and began to fear ‘the shelf’—was her experience of any other breed of men. She produced a little notebook, however, and riffled through the pages, in search of the numerous abortionists whom she and her friends purported to patronize. The names appeared to have got themselves mixed up with those of more innocent entries, however, and, after much searching, she still could not lay her finger upon one working practitioner to whom Rosie, in her extremity, might resort. They fell to boasting to each other of their conquests instead; and which was the more to be pitied might be in doubt—she who had already had too many, or she who had had none.

  And yet, that last was not strictly true; for some weeks ago, while Rosie was still in Switzerland, Melissa, having read in a woman’s magazine that the way to make new friends was to go in for indoor skating and contrive to take a tumble (thus figuratively at any rate breaking the ice) had duly skated and duly fallen, though only in the literal sense; but literally and figuratively both, had duly been ‘picked up’. She, too, had led her victim home for a nice cup of tea, but unlike Rosie had emerged unscathed; for despite the great nonsense she talked Melissa was the soul and body of respectability. She had, however, clung tightly to the young man, intriguing him with a wealth of phoney mystery, ‘playing hard to get’, hinting at depthless passions, reverting before his very eyes to an icy chill. He, older and far the more experienced of the two, played the same game and beat her at it hollow, and enjoyed himself enormously.

  ‘He sounds too divine,’ said Rosie. ‘What’s his name?’

  His name was Stanislas—just Stanislas. They had agreed to call him—simply that. No surname, no address; just a telephone number, and ‘Stanislas’. ‘He’s probably a prince or a count or something,’ said Rosie, much impressed. ‘Is he foreign?’

  Melissa, uneasily aware that Stanislas had in all probability been christened plain Stanley, said hurriedly that his accent was perfect (which was not entirely true) so that one couldn’t quite tell. In return for Rosie’s interest, however, she asked kindly what her chap had been like?

  ‘Which one?’ said Rosie. ‘There were such a lot.’

  ‘Well, er—the Father of the Child.’

  ‘My dear, I haven’t a clue,’ said Rosie, astonished that anyone could be so dense. ‘I thought I told you.’

  ‘You mean all those people were your real—well, I mean your real lovers? And you don’t know which?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Rosie. ‘That’s just what I’ve been saying. And that’s why I can’t sort of get married or anything or do anything about it. There was—well, let’s see, first there was a chap I met in a train and then there was rather a poor one but with a heavenly little flat right up on a hill and that went on for quite a long time, I mean weeks; and then there was a terrifically rich one, only I think I was rather tight at the time, and then there was one with a boat only the boat kept rocking about and I got the giggles, and then—oh, well, I don’t know, simply dozens …’

  ‘But no princes or counts or anything like that?’ said Melissa, clinging jealously to quality in face of all this incontestable quantity.

  ‘No, not like your Stanislas. I think he sounds much nicer than any of mine,’ said Rosie, generously; and since her mind ran in simple circles, never inclusive of more than two ideas at once, she added, hopefully: ‘I suppose he wouldn’t know of a nice cheap foreign abortionist?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d quite like to ask him,’ said Melissa, with no less than the truth.

  And so Rosie had told Matilda and Tedward and Granny and Damien and Melissa. And she couldn’t tell Thomas. And there was nobody else.

  CHAPTER THREE

  O N the morning of the following Thursday, a voice rang up and said, ‘Mathilde?’ and Tilda said, ‘My God! No?’ because only one person in the world would ring up and say, ‘Mathilde?’. And, sure enough, it was Raoul.

  ‘But Raoul, what on earth are you doing in London?’

  ‘I flew here yesterday evening, by air. I have some business in Bruxelles and on the way I thought I might also do a little business in London. And I wished to see you, Mathilde, and have some talk with you.’

  ‘Well, yes, Raoul, how lovely! When could we meet? Any time suits me.’

  ‘This morning I have business and then business lunch and in the afternoon more business: this leaves only this evening because to-morrow morning I fly by air to Bruxelles. You come then and dine with me here at the Ritzotel?’

  Matilda, having assured him that any time would suit her, now found that in fact there was no time at all that would. ‘The hell of it is, Raoul, that it’s the girl’s day out and there’s no one to leave in the house. Come to dinner here?’ (My God, though, what on earth could I give the man?)

  ‘I wish to talk alone with you, Mathilde. Come to my suite here.’

  But Tilda was having no more of that Carouge nonsense! And, anyway, there was the baby and Gran and you could never count on Thomas being in. ‘Hang on for a minute and I’ll see.’ She called down to the basement to know if Melissa could possibly change her day but Melissa had a date with Stanislas and Matilda believed passionately that if one’s employees had arrangements, they shouldn’t be asked to alter them. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Raoul, but I simply can’t.’

  ‘If you think I shall make love to you, Mathilde, it is not this.’

  ‘How disappointing!’ said Matilda, laughing.

  ‘Perhaps that a little too. But it is of something else I must speak.’

  ‘It’s something to do with Rosie!’ said Tilda, tumbling to it at last.

  ‘Well, perhaps; but I cannot speak of it on the telephone. Already I have the idea that someone listens.’ There was a click on the line and he said: ‘There!—you see.’

  ‘How very peculiar,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Well, never mind. I said nothing. Now, to-night—can I see you al
one?’

  ‘Well, yes, all right. You can have dinner here and we’ll talk afterwards. I’ll arrange it.’

  ‘Alors—bien! I come to your house this evening. A quelle heure?’

  ‘Make it half-past seven, will you Raoul? I’ll have to cope with dinner and then there’s the baby to put to bed. You remember I have a daughter now? She’s two and a half.’

  ‘Ma foi!’ said Raoul. The things attractive women did to themselves! She would appear, untying a white flannel apron, holding out hands red from washing little garments, her lap all spread from sitting on a low chair for hours with a baby sprawled across it; when he had known her three or four years ago, already she had been putting on weight. But she had been—très gai! Très gai, toujours gai! And something a little more. That evening under the trees out at Carouge.… A pity that at the last moment … But all English women were virgins at heart. ‘Alors, ma chère—à bientôt!’

  Matilda put down the receiver, looking ruefully at her ruined hands; such good hands before Emma had arrived, not small, but white and always well-manicured, with the oval nails impeccably varnished. It was her one gesture to vanity, to any maintained preoccupation with her appearance. In the old days it had been different, the gay old, racketting-round old days of her working life in London; she had earned good money and spent it too, on clothes and hair-do’s and what the French so impressively call one’s maquillage. There had been nothing else to spend it on. But now … Oh, well—one couldn’t have all this and Thomas and Emma too, and one wouldn’t swap, not in a thousand years. She got up and shook herself back into the frame of mind that copes with dust and dinners and nurseries, but still she glanced at herself with reawakened eyes as she passed the looking-glass. My God I’m getting fat! Oh, well, she thought again—what the hell? If I look thirty-eight it’s because I am thirty-eight; and she was not so vast that a good black dress couldn’t still do wonders for her. For the rest—if one had never had beauty, one had worked all the harder at the other thing—and she knew that she still could whistle a tune that would bring the little birds fluttering down off their branches, cocks and hens and fledglings and eggs and all!