by Barbara Vine
A letter came from him unexpectedly. He never thanked John for the postal orders, and John attributed that to his lover’s embarrassment at being given money. A letter these days was rare, and Maud, picking it up from the doormat, brought it to him held out between thumb and forefinger at arm’s length as one might carry a bag of rotting food. John, eating his breakfast, was growing tired of pandering to her whims. More and more he was resenting the way she took everything as if it were her right and gave nothing in return beyond doing the housekeeping, which was more for herself and Hope than for him. He opened the letter in front of her. It told him that Bertie’s mother, who was only in her fifties, had died of a growth in her throat. His sister’s husband had paid for the funeral.
The tone of his letter wasn’t sorrowful but almost exhilarated. His mother’s house was a poor little place in Paddington, not far from the station, but it had been hers and now it was his. John expected an invitation to follow, but there was nothing. Still, he refused to be downhearted, knowing how hard Bertie found writing anything and how composing a letter tired him out. John got up from the table and told Maud Bertie’s news, not so much to annoy her as to make her realise and accept that Bertie was his friend and his doings of the greatest interest to him.
“I don’t want to hear,” Maud said.
“What has Bertie done to make you dislike him so?”
“It’s what you and he have done together. I’ll never forget the noise you made in the next room to mine and me with my innocent little child.”
He said nothing. Later that day, when school was over, he sent Bertie his usual postal order and put a note in with it asking if he could come and stay a night the following weekend. Knowing how writing was so difficult for Bertie, he added that there was no need to answer if it was all right for John to come on Saturday the sixteenth. Only if it wasn’t convenient was Bertie to “drop me a line.”
MOST DAYS Maud sat down at her sewing machine once Hope was bathed and dressed and playing with her toys, to teach herself procedures more difficult than turning up hems and sewing on buttons. Perhaps she could find an evening class in Ashburton where a teacher taught tailoring and leave Hope just for a couple of hours with John. While she was thinking along these lines, resenting John yet feeling guilty about him, the doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She got up and looked out the window, from where you could sometimes see who it was on the doorstep. But before she turned sideways to see the front door, she saw an enormous and extremely elegant black car parked outside the house, a Rolls-Royce. She recognised only the make of car, which everyone knew at once from its gable-shaped front, a gleaming silver. Of the woman on the doorstep she could catch a glimpse from where she stood of a tailored suit and fox fur, unsuitable for a country village, and a bright splash of yellow hair.
Maud went to the door.
The woman said, “Alicia Imber, and you must be Mrs. Goodwin. How do you do?”
Maud knew you were not expected to reply to this enquiry but say “How do you do?” back. She was so taken aback by the sight of her caller that she could only say, “Come in,” but resisted the temptation to ask her to excuse the mess, of which there was none. Hope, who had been playing with her wooden farmyard, transferring painted-metal Jersey cows from the farmyard to the meadow, left the herd to wait behind the gate while she stared at the newcomer, who said a smiling hallo to her.
“I see you’ve been sewing. Heaven knows how you find the time. I know I never should.”
Mrs. Imber was tall and thin. Maud judged her age at forty, which was the callous overestimate of youth’s instant dislike as Alicia Imber was only thirty-four. The fox fur’s sharp nose and furry forehead nestled against her rouged cheek. Maud asked her to sit down, but instead of doing so, she hovered over the sewing machine, picking up and scrutinising the half-finished winter coat Maud was making for Hope.
“Very nice,” she said, smiling. She laid the coat down. “It was about your sewing that I came. Mrs. Clifford—I think you know her niece—told me the smocking you do is very good, and I was wondering if you could make a dress for my little girl. Would you like to show me a sample?”
Mrs. Clifford was Rosemary and Ronnie’s aunt. What business had she to put this patronising woman onto her? Maud was thinking as she went upstairs. She brought down what she considered Hope’s prettiest dress, green with white and red flowers, the smocking red. Mrs. Imber scrutinised it as if she were a judge in a needlework school-certificate examination, but she smiled. “Well, yes, very nice.” She laid the dress down on the arm of a chair.
“Can I wear it tomorrow, Mummy?” Hope said, darting a suspicious glance at Alicia Imber as if she thought the woman intended to steal it.
“If you like.” Maud said to her guest, “How old is your daughter?”
Like most mothers of a family when asked about one of her children, Mrs. Imber took the question to apply to all of them. “My boys are eight and nine, and they are called Christian and Julian, and my little girl, Charmian, is six. As you can imagine, I miss my sons dreadfully and so does their sister, with no one to play with, but they are away at their private schools and what must be must be.”
“If you could bring Charmian here, I could take her measurements and tell you how much material to buy.”
“Yes, well, we’ll see. Charmian isn’t very strong and I was hoping you would come to me at Dartcombe Hall.”
Maud summoned up all the nerve she had. “It would be best if you came here.”
“Oh, dear. You do like to make the rules, don’t you? I’ll come next Tuesday, shall I?” Maud knew that “shall I?” was a mere figure of speech, meaning nothing. “Good-bye, my dear,” Mrs. Imber said to Hope. “I don’t know your name.”
That evening Maud relayed the conversation to John, but with exaggerations as people with paranoid tendencies do, and adding a phrase she had read somewhere, the first of many such inventions.
“You don’t have to have that woman here,” he said, “or make a dress for her child. We can manage without that.”
“What does noblesse oblige mean, John?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s what she said to me when she was leaving,” Maud lied.
“It means an aristocrat owes it to himself, or maybe God, I don’t know, to bend to the needs of lower-class people.”
“Thank you.”
JOHN WISHED he had lied. Any translation, such as the almost incomprehensible “nobility obliges,” would have done. It soon appeared that Maud’s work wasn’t good enough. John, when buying her the sewing machine, had hoped she would use it and earn something to augment their income, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to happen.
He found it easy enough to be untruthful when he told Maud he was going to London to stay a night, to whom, and why. One of the teachers at school had invited him to come with her to visit her parents in a place called Twickenham. This was half-true, for Elspeth Dean had invited his “wife” as well, but of course he had politely refused. The great thing was to get Maud to believe him, and it appeared that this time she did.
Bertie hadn’t replied. John had said not to do so if coming on Saturday was all right, so evidently it was. Everything seemed to be going smoothly if you didn’t count Maud’s pressing enquiries as stumbling blocks. Who is she? Why have you never mentioned her before? Do you like her? And worst of all, “Do you love her?” It wasn’t the first time he had left Maud alone. On two occasions, taking a room in a boardinghouse, he had stayed a night away. It had always amused him (and been hilarious to Bertie) that the landladies wanted to see the ring on the third finger of the woman’s left hand when it was a couple hoping to stay, nearly asked for their marriage certificate and made them sign the visitors’ book, watching to see if she forgot and signed Jean Brown instead of Jean Smith. No landlady had suspected anything untoward of John and Bertie, they were obviously pals who would quite naturally be happy to share a bed, not just a bedroom. But no such minor
incidents this time. They would share their bed in Bertie’s late mother’s house.
It would be the first time he had visited it. He knew more or less where it was and set off from Paddington station through a maze of dirty little streets in the direction of the Grand Union Canal and the one beautiful building to be seen, the tall and narrow Gothic church of St. Mary Magdalene, with its tapering spire, that stood almost on its bank. On this cold, dry, grey autumn day, a sharp wind whipped round street corners. A galvanised-iron dustbin stood on the rectangle of concrete that served as Bertie’s front garden, and beside it, leaning against the house wall, was a motorbike with badly worn tyres. There was no doorbell. The flap on the letterbox had welded itself to its rusty surround, so there appeared to be no way of gaining admittance. About to bang on the door with his fist, John tried the blackened brass handle first. The door opened and he stepped inside.
The house smelt unpleasant, a combination of paraffin, fried fish, and urine. The door to the front room had fallen off its hinges and been left leaning against the wall. Every surface in the room and the passage had been painted dark brown, but so long ago that much of it had bubbled up and was peeling away to show the tinned-salmon colour underneath. It was cold. John called out Bertie’s name. Nothing happened and he called again.
A door slammed upstairs and Bertie appeared at the top of the stairs. He was naked but for a pair of cotton trousers and the braces which held them up. “Oh, it’s you. Bit early, aren’t you?”
“I think I said the afternoon.”
John took in the situation even before Bertie’s companion had emerged from the bedroom. Once, not long ago, John wouldn’t have understood, but in the intervening year or two he had lost his innocence. He had discovered Bertie in flagrante delicto, a term John had come across somewhere but never expected to experience himself. Yet he knew Bertie now. He knew how he lived and what he did. It was still a terrible shock.
The man who was now behind Bertie seemed to have hurriedly put on a shirt and trousers and, a good six inches taller, could clearly be seen struggling to tie his tie. Bertie came a few steps down. He said, incredibly, “I don’t suppose you’ve had your dinner. You get along to Delamere Road, there’s a café there. I’ll join you in ten minutes.”
If only he had had the sense, John thought as he walked away from the house, to have told Bertie to write if his visit was convenient, not if it wasn’t. But would Bertie have written at all? He didn’t care, he had no feeling for John’s feelings, he had made it plain that men such as them could have as many partners as they liked (partners in crime) and no one was to mind, no one was to be jealous. John was experiencing the sorrow of the man who knows that he passionately loves someone who is unworthy of his love. Even thinking that way made him ashamed of his arrogance in priding himself on being better than Bertie. He found the café and walked past it—he felt food would have choked him—down to the bank of the Grand Union Canal. He had heard people refer to it as a river, not knowing the difference between this still, stagnant water and a flowing stream. This water was a greenish brown and quite opaque. A narrow boat went by, low enough to pass under the first bridge and the second and through the tunnel at Maida Hill, not far from where he had first lived in London. In the wake of the boat came a pair of Canada geese and a bobbing coot, the white flash on its head bright on this dull day. John had never before thought of putting an end to things but now it occurred to him that to fill his pockets with stones and slip into that cold, brown water would bring him a peaceful death. He turned away and walked to the station.
A train for Penzance had just gone. He was cold but a fire was in the waiting room and no one sitting on the horsehair settee that was near to it. Strangely, the warmth made him feel better. It wasn’t simply a physical improvement but a mental cheering up. Perhaps he had been too hasty, perhaps he should have stayed, got Bertie to send the tall man away, talked to his lover, explaining how unhappy Bertie’s infidelities—that was how John saw them—made him feel. In spite of the hunger which was now returning, he fell asleep with his head resting against the slippery, black fabric. At some point he was aware of a porter coming in to tend to the fire from a scuttle of coal, the man calling him sir and asking if he was all right. John thought he might be turned out onto the cold platform, but this didn’t happen. He was aware of other people coming and going, but they took no notice of him and he went back to sleep.
This time it was only a doze, broken by waking dreams, as he began once more to think what he should do. He was ignorant, apart from what he had read in English literature, of how hard it is to give up someone with whom you have an intense sexual bond. His eyes still closed, he tried to imagine life without Bertie, the emptiness, the longing that would need to find expression in a howl of grief. He knew now, he knew what the books had never told him.
Outside, it was dark. He sat there, half lay there, wondering how hard it would be to walk to the end of the platform and, when the great train came in from the West Country, still going fast, to slip off onto the rails and lie down quietly to let it pass over him. He heard the porter come back and, instead of kneeling in front of the fireplace, sit down beside him on the settee. John opened his eyes and saw it was Bertie.
“So this is where you’ve got to. Fine dance you’ve led me, and I’m bleeding frozen.”
John wanted to do what he thought he would never do again and certainly dared not do here, throw his arms round him and kiss him the way a man and a woman were allowed to kiss. All he could do was murmur that he loved him.
“Then you’d best come back to my place like you said you would. Never mind Davy, he’s just rubbish. He don’t count. Come on now. Pull yourself together and we’ll go get ourselves a slap-up meal first.”
So John went with him, hating himself but powerless to refuse.
16
MRS. IMBER came back in the Rolls-Royce, bringing Charmian with her to be measured for her frock, and consented this time to be given a cup of tea. The two little girls, much the same age, got on well, rather better, Maud thought, than Hope did with Maureen Crocker, and Maud hoped a closer acquaintance might be possible. But when she suggested that Charmian might come again to play with Hope’s wooden farmyard and the metal animals or in the little wooden house John had built for her in the garden, Mrs. Imber looked almost shocked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Perhaps you didn’t know, but Charmian often isn’t quite well.”
“That woman is the worst kind of snob,” Maud said to John. “There’s nothing wrong with the child. It’s just that we’re not good enough for them. Gladys told me the Imbers are basically brewers. All their money comes from beer. Two generations back they were farm labourers.”
John was content for Hope to have her village friends. She would soon be going to school and make more. Since she had become four he was more and more conscious that while she called him Daddy, he wasn’t her father, was indeed her uncle, and “living a lie,” as he put it to himself, was increasingly upsetting to him. Since the episode of Bertie’s flagrant and apparently guiltless unfaithfulness, their encounters had always taken place in the little slum house in Paddington. No one ever cleaned it. Plainly it was not only filthy but disintegrating, and although in receipt of money from his lover whenever John could afford it, Bertie spent nothing on his home. He seemed not to notice the smell or the slowly failing plumbing. What primitive electrical wiring there was had ceased to function, a failure Bertie attributed to the cables being chewed through by mice. But John had seen a rat when arriving there one evening, the half-tame animal sitting beside the dustbin and staring insolently at him. Bertie laughed when John told him.
He had never again visited Bury Row. The only visitor from John’s world was Elspeth Dean, the music teacher, and one of only two women on his boys’ school staff, and she came not at his invitation but at Maud’s. The illusion that John and Maud were a married couple had to be sustained and not just in the village, but whereas Joh
n knew that this must be permanent, Maud hoped that if, for instance, they moved somewhere new, they might revert to being brother and sister. She thought that if Elspeth became her friend and John saw her in their domestic setting, he might grow fond enough of her to see her as a possible wife. As for herself, ever since Rosemary’s visit—never repeated—she had wondered about Ronnie and for months half expected him to write or even visit. Though the months had stretched to years and he had never come, she still thought it a chance that they would meet and the love they had never had for each other would blossom like a long-neglected plant which, when fed and watered, might come into bloom.
John too hoped for changes, but of a different kind. To him, Elspeth, though pleasant and pretty and possessed of a lovely singing voice, was rather a nuisance in the house in the evenings, someone to talk to he had no wish to converse with, someone who seemed to be growing fonder of him when he knew and expected Maud to know that he was irrevocably “one of those” or “queer” as he and Bertie put it. The changes he wanted and saw as happening in the future were much the same as Maud’s, that they might move away and become brother and sister again, that someone come along and marry Maud, so that she was supported otherwise than by him and leave him free to take a house somewhere to share with Bertie.
At least now Bertie seemed to look upon their relationship as permanent, John coming up to Paddington once every two or three weeks and sending him a couple of pound notes in an envelope between visits. They no longer discussed it, but John was sure that Bertie’s occasional adventures with Davy and his kind still took place and always would. He decided that he could bear it so long as he was told nothing about it and never again was to be shocked by the sight he had had on his first visit to Bertie’s house.