by Barbara Vine
Trollope says somewhere that any piece of unpleasant news is best imparted by letter. Well, he says something like that. This was all very well in his day, the day of all those poor girls disgraced by having babies without getting married first. Imagine telling your brother by e-mail or text that you’re going to have his lover’s baby. Or even on the phone. No, it had to be a confrontation and it had to be today. I knew myself so I knew it had to be done on an impulse. I had to be doing something else, maybe starting on a second read of The Child’s Child, and suddenly in the midst of it, jump up, run across the hall, and burst in on them. With my news, my news that it was not too far-fetched to say could ruin my brother’s life.
9
I SAW FROM their faces that Andrew knew but had perhaps only just known. I guessed that James had told him a few hours or even minutes before. None of us said anything for quite a long time. Andrew looked at me, then he dropped his head and shut his eyes. I half expected James to get up and say he’d get a drink of something because neither Andrew nor I was going to do that, but James didn’t, he went on sitting there, very still, his face very blank. It’s odd what we think of at times like this, incongruous, irrelevant things. It occurred to me sort of out of the blue that neither Andrew nor James had ever told me that James was coming to live at Dinmont House. I had worried myself into sleepless nights over it, and then somehow I had forgotten about it, worked on the thesis, read The Child’s Child, and the whole thing had gone out of my head. And now James was sitting here with a hangdog look—whatever does that mean? I must look it up—refusing to catch my eye, I too probably with the same cautious and miserable expression, while Andrew presided like the embodiment of despair.
I thought he was never going to speak, and then after a long time he did. “I don’t think I can remain in this house with the two of you. Or perhaps I should say, the three of you. I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about nothing else since James told me yesterday.” So it had been longer ago than I suspected. Hours and hours he had known and said nothing to me. “I can imagine that you, Grace, fixed up a pretty little scenario in which your baby has a daddy and an uncle and looks a lot like all of us. It might be a kind of Design for Living, a twenty-first-century one Noël Coward didn’t write, but in that comedy there’s no infant.” It was so near the truth that I felt myself blushing, one of those blushes that deepen and darken until your face is burning. “I don’t suppose it’s too late for an abortion,” he said, “but I wouldn’t ask you to have one, I wouldn’t dream of it. I wouldn’t ask you to have a baby adopted either, of course not. You wouldn’t anyway. But I shan’t be able to bear to see it or see James with it or see you with James even if you never so much as touch each other’s hand. So I shall go away.” Andrew turned to look at James. “I’d like you to come with me, just you. We could go and live in your flat.” Like a child Andrew said, “Would that be all right?”
James just nodded.
“I don’t know how I’ll feel in a year’s time,” Andrew said. “We never know that, do we?”
There were a thousand things to say but I knew I could say none of them. Not now. Perhaps one day. I got up and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind me. That night I dreamt I had a miscarriage, a flood of blood inundating the bed and the carpet. It was one of those dreams you believe to be true, and I woke up shivering and crying, certain I’d lost the baby. But it had been, as they say, only a dream, as if a dream were nothing much to get upset about.
Two days later, days I’d spent in isolation and utter idleness, I watched from the study window the departure of Andrew and James. They had wasted no time. Even people who bring no furniture into a house have an awful lot to take out. They accumulate so much, computers and books and devices for reading books, devices for playing music, and quantities of other electronic stuff. Andrew and James needed a van to take it all to James’s place, and Andrew was going to drive it. I saw James come back into the house. He knocked on the study door.
“I can’t just go,” he said. “You’ve got my phone number, you know where I’ll be. I’ll want to know how you get on.”
“Once upon a time,” I said with a little laugh, “you’d have offered to marry me. Funny, isn’t it? It’s not so long ago but it seems like a thousand years.”
“Good-bye, Grace.” Then, and it was the last thing I’d have expected him to say: “This will bind us together for ever, won’t it?”
“I suppose it will. Good-bye, James.”
He kissed me on the cheek. His lips were cold.
Andrew was already sitting in the driving seat, waiting impatiently, it seemed to me from the window. I realised then—I don’t know why then—that although we’d spoken in the past few days, about practical things, about arrangements, he hadn’t once called me Sis.
I phoned my mother and said I’d something to tell her. She said she’d come to me on her way home from work. It was going to be a case of what do you want first, the good news or the bad, but I wasn’t going to put it to her like that. I was thinking about that, and that doom-laden enquiry that seems to amuse people so much, when I felt a sort of shifting sensation inside my body. For a few seconds I couldn’t think what it was, and then of course I knew. The baby had moved.
A flutter. A touch, no more than that, as if a small finger had brought a light pressure onto the wall that confined it. I wondered when it would come again, and as if in answer to a speculation I hadn’t uttered aloud—but I wouldn’t have to, would I?—it, he, she, touched me again and I began to cry. The tears were still coming, scrubbed away but still falling, when my mother arrived.
“Oh, dear,” she said, looking at my face, “this won’t do.”
“It’s not that I’m desperately unhappy or anything.”
“Emotion makes us cry, not unhappiness.”
I had given up wine “for the duration,” but she hadn’t, so I drank Elderflower water and she had some sauvignon and I told her about the baby’s moving and Andrew’s departure.
“He’s impulsive,” she said. “Like you. He rushes into things. He’ll come round.”
I asked her what she meant by that, that he’d change his mind or physically come to the house.
“Well, both.”
That was the end of August, and in the first week of September they told me my baby was a girl. Whatever the fate of the thesis, it seemed to me appropriate to call my daughter after one of those girls I had been writing about, and not hesitating for long, I named her after Hardy’s Tess.
In the second week of that month I read Martin Greenwell’s book for the second time.
1
HE KNEW it was wrong of him, but his life today was so full of wrong actions that it seemed to him one long sin. Some of it he could put right, and the letter of resignation he was carrying to the post would begin that process. He dropped the letter into the pillar box and stood for a moment looking at the building opposite, a school like dozens of other schools in the country: brown brick with redbrick facings to the windows and redbrick arches over them, double doors painted black, a little, pointed belfry with the school bell inside, and all around the broad, asphalted playground. Turning away, he was beginning the half-mile walk homewards when a voice behind him called out, “Johnny!”
Only one person ever called him that. John had sometimes wished he had been born a woman, had been one of his three sisters, not the only boy, so that now he could hold out his arms and take the man who had called him into them, could kiss him. And then all that would happen would be young women passersby giggling and old women clicking their tongues. It was impossible and always would be. They stood in front of each other, afraid to touch.
“I’m awfully pleased to see you,” John said.
“Me too. You got any money so we can go out to supper somewhere?”
“Home first, though.”
They walked up the Edgware Road and turned into Orchard-son Street. The district was dull but not squalid, the terraced
houses grim-looking because of their grey brickwork, the colour of ash. When John let himself and Bertie into Mrs. Petworth’s house, his landlady was in the hall tidying up the tumble of letters and pile of outdated newspapers on the mahogany table. She said, “Good evening, Mr. Goodwin,” smiled, and nodded to Bertie. A widow, desperate to be thought respectable, she was strict with her lodgers when it came to young ladies in their rooms. Such visitors must be out by nine o’clock. Innocent but cautious, she believed that sexual intercourse took place only after ten, but she was taking no chances. She infinitely preferred young men who had no young ladies—that should come later when they were fiancées—but chose for their companions members of the same sex. That was suitable and proper.
To show her approval of Bertie as John’s visitor, she remarked to him as he set foot on the first stair that it had been a fine day and would seem that spring had come at last. Bertie agreed, and he and John climbed the two flights to the second floor. John was always in two minds about locking the door. If Mrs. Petworth tried his door—a most unlikely eventuality—she would think it strange, almost sinister, that he had seen fit to lock it. Why would he? What was he doing in there? Drinking? Playing cards? On the other hand, he dared not leave it unlocked. The truth, in her eyes, would be so much worse than the whisky or the cards. She would send the girl who helped in the kitchen for a policeman. His life and Bertie’s life would be over.
Knowing nothing of what went on in John’s head, Bertie was stripping off his clothes without the least inhibition. John did so too, but even though Bertie had been his lover for a year now, he still felt shame showing his naked body. That was the way he had been brought up, never to show nakedness, never even to speak of it.
They made love. At the moment of climax Bertie always cried out, making a sound John believed anyone passing the door or standing outside must be able to identify for what it was. He himself only sighed with pleasure, his hand clamped over Bertie’s mouth to hush the noise.
IN THE café where they had a beefsteak and mashed potatoes, washed down with a pint of beer each, John told Bertie what was in the letter and what he planned to do. Bertie showed little emotion. He nodded, he went on eating.
“You mean you’ll get a job teaching in a school down there?”
“Somewhere in Devon, yes. I’ve applied to Devon County Council and they’re interviewing me next week.”
“But what are you doing it for, Johnny?”
“I don’t want to say anything to hurt you. I don’t want to upset you.”
“You won’t,” said Bertie. “I’m hard. You’d best be hard in our game.”
“I know, but I can’t be.” John laid his knife and fork across his half-empty plate. He could eat no more. “I said I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t, but I believe that what we do, what all men do who do it together, I believe that’s a sin. It’s a crime, of course, but it’s a sin too and that’s worse. We sin, you and I, but it’s an even worse sin when we go to those places where there are all men like us, all Uranians behaving like us.”
In an incredulous voice Bertie said, “You’ll go to hell, will you, when you die? Come off it. We don’t do no harm, we don’t hurt no one.” Bertie was a clerk in an office but not earning much, the lowest rank, the one who made the tea and fetched the post. “We do all right together, don’t we?”
“I’m not saying we don’t enjoy it. That’s why we do it. Maybe we hurt ourselves, damage our characters, I don’t know.”
“That’s too deep for me,” Bertie said. “Can I come and see you when you’re living in Devon in a cottage?”
“You know what would happen then, don’t you?”
“That’s why I’d come.”
“You see, Bertie, I intend for it never to happen again.”
Bertie shook his head, half-smiling. “I can’t believe that.”
“What we did just now, that was the last time for me.” John looked about the café to check that all the customers were occupied with their own business, and then he took Bertie’s hand under the table. “It was lovely. It was a great joy to me. But it must never happen again, never in all my life. I’ve got to be—well, like a monk. Women aren’t anything to me, just as they’re not for you. So the only choice I have is to go with men or be celibate. That’s the word, celibate. And I will be. I’ll teach in a school out in the country and I’ll live there and there won’t be any people like us. There won’t be any temptation.”
Bertie was silent, staring at him. At last he said, “What about me? What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know. You’ll find someone. The time may come someday when men like us aren’t hunted down and persecuted, when we’re allowed to—to love each other in private, but it’s a long way off. I’ll write to you, Bertie, I won’t deny myself that. Will you write to me?”
Bertie said nothing but he nodded. On and off as if he would never stop.
2
THE GREAT Western train was half-empty, not unusual at this hour on a weekday. John noticed the name on the side of the engine, the George V. It was heading for Penzance, but he would leave it at Exeter St. Davids, where his interview was to take place, and, when that was over, take another train to Bristol. The expense, even travelling third class, was more than he could really afford. It would have been much cheaper to have bought a return ticket and gone back to Orchardson Street—just a short walk from Paddington station—but he hadn’t been home since Christmas and was longing to see his mother and his sisters, Sybil, Ethel, and Maud. His father too, but his fondness for his father was tempered with fear. He was always afraid that his father would find out.
He got into the train with his Daily Telegraph, his packet of sandwiches prepared by Mrs. Petworth, and the Player’s he had bought at the tobacconists on the station. He was early, so easily found a seat in a smoking compartment. The difficulty would have been to find one where smoking was forbidden. He rationed his cigarettes to ten a day for economy’s sake, and he had already had two. An old man sat in the best window seat, the one facing the engine. He still wore his overcoat but had put his homburg in the luggage rack. John put his attaché case up there at the other end, sat down, and lit a cigarette. He had been travelling three or four times a year on this line for four years but he still felt a thrill when the guard blew the whistle and they were off. A great plume of steam swept past the window and drifted up into the air as they headed for Reading and Taunton and entered the long, dark Whiteball tunnel into Devonshire.
When he was alone, in bed at night, or as now travelling some long distance, he let his thoughts take a journey of their own and remember how he and Bertie had met. At the same time he wished that it had been somewhere else, some green country place perhaps or a foreign city of beautiful buildings and antique treasures, where of course he had never been, instead of a pub in Paddington. He saw it as a sordid place, crowded with dirty, hoarse-voiced labouring men and presided over by a fat landlord and a sluttish barmaid. His own idealistic dream of such an encounter—for it had been love at first sight for him—would have had them meet each other alone and with eyes for no one but one another. But it had been the Prince Alfred, half a mile from where Bertie lived in Bourne Terrace, round the back of Paddington station, and a little farther than that from Orchardson Street, and it had been a cold, wet evening. Bertie’s beauty, his grace, his height, and his wonderful blue eyes had lit the place for him, and his smile, with his golden head held a little on one side, promised a lovely, happy future.
What they did that evening and subsequent evenings, even though often in squalid places, brought that happiness for a while, but gradually guilt had closed in. It was wrong. He couldn’t get away from that. He tried hard to persuade himself that though lust could be wrong, love never could. His sister Ethel was allowed to love Herbert Burrows, her fiancé, allowed to linger on the doorstep with him exchanging kisses before he went home. John’s kisses shared with Bertie had to be taken and given in the deepest secrecy because s
ociety and he too knew that while Ethel’s were right and good, his were wrong and bad. All that lovemaking was wrong and must be abandoned for good.
The train emerged from the tunnel into Devonshire.
THE THREE men who were the panel had liked him, he could tell that. They only said they would let him know, but he could tell he had pleased them, due perhaps to his having his degree from the University College of the South West of England just up the street. The others would have only teacher training qualifications or no more than Higher School Certificate. They would be surprised too that he was giving up a teaching post in London and the extra money called the London weighting to come to work in a small Devon country town. Perhaps they would be suspicious, but he was sure they wouldn’t guess the truth. They had asked him about his wife and he had had to say he wasn’t married. Then one old busybody suggested that perhaps he had a fiancée, and John, feeling guilty and ashamed, lied and said that there was someone. They were saving up to get married. He was afraid one of the panel might say that in that case he was surprised John was giving up a better-paid job, but none of them did. Fiancées, nearly as much as wives, met with approval.
He had a long wait for his next train, the one that would take him to Bristol, and he was hungry in spite of the sandwiches. In a café he had a cup of tea and a poached egg on toast and sat thinking about the lie he had told. He told lies all the time, he was more or less resigned to that, and most of them were concerned with when was he going to find a girl or when was he going to get married. Because the only social life he had was with Bertie and the men Bertie knew, he came into little contact with middle-aged women who might try to foist their spinster daughters on him. He teetered too on the border of being a gentleman. A doctor was one but not a schoolteacher, though he might be if he was head of a school. This meant he would never be invited to tennis parties or tea dances, he would be asked to tea only with women teachers, and he would be expected one day to marry one of them. He had lied to them as well, talking in a vague way of a girl in Bristol living in the same street as his parents.