by Jane Bailey
‘I didn’t know you played,’ said Ralph, coming back into the room after farewells in the hallway.
‘I don’t – isn’t it obvious? I’m a one-tune girl.’
He studied me intently. ‘It’s a pity you think like that.’
There was nothing flirtatious in his tone. He sat down on the floor beside us with one elbow on his upright knee and watched patiently as Tighe taught me a new tune. I kept getting the notes wrong and soon realized that I had had too much to drink to concentrate properly. I held out my glass when he produced the bottle again, but Ralph quickly put his hand over the top.
‘Be careful, Dora. You’re not used to drinking, and I think you may have had enough.’
I was indignant. I should have been grateful, but such was the effect of the alcohol on my inhibitions that I was quite happy to be rude. Tighe stood up tactfully and disappeared to the bathroom.
‘I’ll drink what I like. I don’t need you to tell me what I can and can’t do.’
‘You have to get home somehow.’
‘Says who?’
It was wildly provocative, and I couldn’t believe the words had come from my mouth. I lay back on the cushion and leant on my elbows, body stretched out in front. He gently took hold of my stockinged feet. ‘Dora, you’re squiffy, and I’m going to walk you home.’
He stood up and went to fetch my coat. I should have heard this as a compliment, but all I heard was that I wasn’t enough to tempt him, and he wanted me gone. I felt humiliated, stupid. I tried to stand but felt dizzy, so I put a hand on the mantelpiece for support. What a fool I was making of myself. Suddenly I wanted him to want me, this man I had tried to shake off before. Now even he didn’t want me. I was worth more than this.
He walked me back to my accommodation through the bitterly cold Cotswold night. I felt sick a few times, but I don’t think I threw up. He supported me with a strong arm around my shoulder and under my armpit. I leant heavily against him and must have muttered some foolish things. When we eventually arrived back, it was only just before midnight and he was afraid the place would be locked. They did that in those days. You couldn’t stay out after twelve. I was almost pleased.
‘You’ll have to take me home with you,’ I remember saying.
‘I don’t fancy sleeping on the floor.’
‘You wouldn’t have to, would you?’
This much I do remember: the large house I lived in with the other women was still open. He pushed me against the wall to steady me, and he took my head in his big hands. ‘Dora, you’ve had too much to drink, and I’m not going to take advantage of you. But don’t think for a moment that I don’t want you. I want you when you know exactly what you’re doing, when you remember every detail. I want you when you want me so badly it hurts. And you will want me.’
Then he kissed me lightly on the lips and left.
17
ARTHUR
I’m not proud of this period of my life. It makes me cringe to think of it. However, I think, if I’m honest, that although I was devastated by what I had done to Dora, and although I would have given anything to have her love me again, I was also a bit elated. It’s a big thing to happen to a man. I mean, it wasn’t how I’d expected it to happen, but Pippa . . . she overwhelmed me. I don’t think any man could’ve resisted her. No, that’s just making excuses for myself, I know. But I felt like a king. I was riding on the crest of a wave. I was ecstatic. And at the same time . . .
I couldn’t imagine anything I could possibly say to Dora that would make her forgive me. I knew she was a sweet-natured and forgiving person, but I also knew that Pippa was someone she had warned me off, and so I had let her down pretty emphatically. I sent her a postcard asking her to see me, to give me a chance to explain things, but I had no reply. I sent her another one a few days later, begging her to see me, but in the intervening days, I’m ashamed to say, Pippa called by again, and again I weakened. That probably sounds pathetic. I loved Dora more than I can say, but . . . Pippa made me feel so alive, so powerful, so electric, I almost didn’t want to resist her.
Pippa became quite sulky when I told her I had to see Dora.
‘I see, so I’m just your plaything, am I?’
‘Look, I didn’t ask you to turn up and stop me getting engaged.’
‘Oh, so you still want to marry her. I’m all right for a bit of fun, but she’s the one you’ll marry!’
‘Dora wouldn’t touch me with a bargepole now!’
‘But you’d still marry her if you could, is that it? So you really are just using me!’
She stamped off down the stairs, taking her clothes with her. I followed, bewildered at this new turn of events. If I asked Pippa to marry me she would scoff at me. I stood naked, watching her step into her flouncy petticoat and carefully roll up her stockings and attach them to her suspenders, and I felt helpless.
‘What do you want from me?’
She wriggled into her dress and pouted. ‘Why don’t you come and visit my family home?’
‘All right. I will.’
She softened, then, and wrote down the address in Gloucestershire on a notepad in the kitchen. Next weekend, she said. She didn’t stay, though. She left me with that thought: that she wanted me to meet her parents.
I had pictured myself going up to Cheltenham that weekend to see Dora. I would tell her everything: the way I had been surprised by Pippa’s arrival, how she had got hold of the address from my landlady, the way I had been overwhelmed by Pippa’s crying . . . Was I going to tell her about my repeat performances? I would have to leave those out. It already felt like a shabby way to excuse myself.
Now it occurred to me that I could combine my visit to Pippa’s home with a visit to Dora. At the very least I owed her a face-to-face apology. After all, I wasn’t sure if anything else was possible, but I knew I had to talk to her, to see her face again. It was too wretched a way to leave things as they stood. There had been no reply to my postcards. I had even phoned the college on three occasions but was told on the last two attempts that my first message had certainly been forwarded.
My work at the aeronautical company was frenetic. I had recently been promoted and needed to stay too late after work to be catching trains on a Friday. Instead I arrived at her accommodation block at about eleven-thirty on the Saturday morning. I was told she was out, so asked when she might be back. The lady in charge had seen me with Dora in the past and said she would go and ask her room-mate for me. While I waited, I looked at the half-open front door which flooded the lobby with April-green light, and I wondered what on earth I would say if Dora walked through it right then. But Dora was out until lunchtime, it seemed, and so I went to sit in the garden. It was an unusually clement day and the little wall I chose to sit on was warm. The blackthorn blossom was out already, and squirrels scampered about the base of the beech trees that stood between me and the front door.
I don’t suppose I was there more than half an hour, but it seemed like an age. It didn’t occur to me to chicken out, but I was feeling sweaty, and the more I thought about what I would say, the more pointless it seemed being there at all. I was looking at the squirrels and wishing that I, too, could dart up a tree, when I heard her voice. Heard her laugh, to be more precise. I looked up and saw Dora in a full swirling skirt and a white, tight-waisted blouse. Her hair was swept up in a chignon that I had never seen before, and she was smiling. I allowed myself a wave of relief at her high spirits, but then my stomach did a little somersault. The cause of her smile was a man: a young, good-looking man with brown curly hair and a slightly bohemian air to him. I had started to get up. Now I sat down again, and from my position on the wall I saw him stop, cup the side of her face in his hand, and kiss her gently on the lips.
‘See you at seven,’ he said. Then she said ‘okay’ or something I couldn’t quite hear, and he called back to her, ‘Say thank you to your father for me!’ And then he added, louder still, because he was already some way off and she was climbing th
e steps to the front door, ‘I’ll thank him myself when I meet him!’
I was furious. Ridiculous, isn’t it? What right had I to be angry? I stood up and marched over to her.
‘Dora!’
She was about to disappear behind the front door when she saw me. I can’t describe her expression. Still bearing the traces of her delight with the other man, it was sad and lovely and intelligent and utterly beautiful.
She closed the door gently behind her.
I knocked heavily. There was a delay before the woman I’d first seen came to answer it, telling me that Dora did not wish to see me.
I waited another half-hour, hoping she might come out and go to eat somewhere, but she did not. If I’d been half a man I would have waited there all day and all night. I would have watched the dawn come up and still have been there, bedraggled yet determined, when she came out in the morning. That’s what I wish I’d done. Instead, I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and studied some times I had written down. If I went straight to the bus station, I could still be at Pippa’s family home, as agreed, for the afternoon.
18
DORA
The week after the party Ralph telephoned to ask if I would like to meet up with him on Saturday morning. Apparently he was writing a book about the plight of coal miners, and he wanted me to help him with his research. He was thrilled at the possibility of gleaning some first-hand experiences from me. I was flattered of course, and considering his gallantry on the last occasion I’d seen him, it felt safe to accept.
We met in a little coffee shop in Montpellier, not far from his house. I didn’t drink coffee, so I asked if I might have a cup of tea instead. He looked nonplussed for a moment, and then delighted, as if he had learnt something new to add to his collection of knowledge about the working class.
‘Of course! A pot of tea for two it is, then!’
When I had gone home to my parents straight after the discovery of Arthur’s betrayal, I had sought out my father’s scrapbook and brought it back to Cheltenham with me. I had done so because in it, amongst all the cuttings on local mining accidents, was a photograph of the children rescued from Boat Nine. There was Arthur sitting on deck with a naval officer’s hat on his head, sandwiched between a grinning Graham and myself. In fact, we are all smiling, because the man who took the photo made us say ‘cheese’, and it is only Pippa, sitting a little apart, who has barely a trace of a smile. I had pored over this grainy photograph over the last couple of weeks, studying the faces for signs of what was to come. Of course, I knew why Pippa was unable to look fully happy, and I knew as well the secret torment in Arthur’s head. If he’d had news that his brother was alive, that safe smile would have been a joyous one. I looked at that dear face, and I couldn’t see any hint of a deceiver. What had happened to him? I had reached the point where I couldn’t look at that photo any more and was planning to take the book back home, when Ralph suggested I help him with his research. Now I relinquished the fat scrapbook I had been hugging to my chest and placed it on the table.
‘I thought you might find this helpful. It belongs to my father. It’s mostly stuff about mining accidents where the authorities have been negligent.’
He gently opened the first page, then turned to the second and the third, a look of charmed amazement lighting up his face. ‘Oh, Dora. Dora, Dora! This is wonderful. This is . . . exactly the sort of thing I need. And he’s written in it too. He’s added his own comments! This is priceless. May I borrow it?’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t know I have it, so please be careful, won’t you?’
‘Of course. Perhaps I can come and meet him sometime?’
I tried to picture a meeting between Ralph and my father. My father would undoubtedly think him a toff and feel patronized by his interest. And what would Ralph make of the newspaper on the chairs and the tin bath by the fire and the outside lav with its squares of newspaper on a string? I smiled at the thought. ‘Perhaps.’
I gathered from Ralph that he was the eldest son of a wealthy family, set to inherit a title and a country manor he did not wish to have. His father was exasperated with him, convinced that his socialism was a fad or a childish attempt to annoy him. He had given Ralph the house in Cheltenham on loan and allowed him to keep the tenants’ rent by way of having something to live off, but he expected him to find respectable employment. He had threatened to disinherit Ralph if he didn’t ‘make good’ before the end of the year.
‘So you’ve found work as a journalist?’
‘I’ve set up my own newspaper. It’s called Plight.’
It took me some time to realize that this was a pattern with Ralph’s ‘set’. You had a house on loan but allowed people to think you owned it. You started up a newspaper of your own which you tried to give away on street corners and you called yourself a journalist. You fancied writing a book, so you called yourself a writer. You fancied a girl, so you called her your researcher. But, as I say, it took me some time to work all this out. Back then I was young and keen and easily impressed. What did I know?
‘Where can I buy a copy? I’d love to read it.’
‘Would you? Well, I think I can let you have a copy for free, as it’s you.’
‘Thank you! And what about the book? What’s it called?’
‘It’s going to be called The Working Man’s Struggle.’
I didn’t think this was a very catchy title, but I suppressed anything negative I felt. Ralph was so positive about everything he did that I began to feel caught up in his enthusiasm. And when he later gave me a copy of Plight, a thin pamphlet with very dense print and clichéd views of class in which every working man was some sort of hero with his own detailed plans to bring down capitalism and put the world to rights, I said I thought it was wonderful, and to my shame, I probably convinced myself that it was.
When the waitress brought our tea things we sat quietly while she set them out carefully before us. I could sense him watching me, and when I looked up he was studying me intently. He waited for the waitress to leave us.
‘You’re beautiful, Dora.’
I didn’t know where to look, so I poured the milk into the cups. Then he added something very cunning, because (as I later found out) he already knew about my disastrous engagement from Jenny, who had not been able to keep a secret: ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I realize you are already spoken for. It just slipped out.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘What I meant to say was that I find you intelligent and perceptive and exactly the sort of person I’m looking for to help me with this project. Please say yes.’
I smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘And please let me take you out to discuss it further tonight.’
‘Well . . .’
‘On a friendly basis. A work basis. I won’t call you beautiful, I promise.’
I smiled again. ‘All right. If you like.’
When I returned to my accommodation, I had a real shock. I had just said goodbye to Ralph when Arthur came running up behind me towards the steps, shouting my name. You can’t imagine how much I had longed for him to do this. Every night I had been here since that fateful day in Bristol, I had imagined him beating a path to my door. I lay in bed wondering if he was waiting outside for me. I crept down each morning in search of post before anyone else saw me, and I checked outside the front door to see if he was waiting on the steps. I made excuses for him, picturing him trying to make it but being held up by work, or delaying his visit because he was waiting for some special gift he had ordered to arrive in a jewellery shop, or else one of his parents had fallen ill and he had to be by their side, when all the time he longed to be with me, and telling me what had really happened and that it was not how it seemed at all. There was a perfectly logical explanation. But now three weeks had passed, and I had given up hoping. Or rather, I hadn’t given up, but any gesture he made now would have a ring of insincerity about it. How could any man be sincere with such a lack of urgency?
‘Dora!’ he shouted.
I looked at him briefly, the face of all my dreams and cherished hopes, and I saw his dear, pleading eyes. For a moment I wanted to bury my head in his shoulder and cry in his arms. I wanted to hold him and feel him press himself against me like he used to with such frenzy, but his timing was too irresolute to be excused. His half-heartedness seemed to blot out all the honest pleading of his eyes, and I found myself closing the door on him. And when I had done it, I felt stronger.
I went to my room and heard him hammering on the door downstairs. Miss Locke came up and asked me if I wanted to see a visitor who had called by earlier, and I said no. I lay on my bed for twenty minutes or so and then tiptoed on to the landing to see through the window if he was still there. He was sitting on the wall, gazing wistfully at the front door. I went back to my room, elated. I would have to go over to the canteen, and I would pass him. It would give him a chance to show me what he was made of. I must have still entertained a hope that he could convince me to go back to him.
Of course, when I opened the front door to walk over to the dining hall, he was gone.
Ralph took me to a restaurant that evening. He had chosen a slightly downmarket one and ordered shepherd’s pie to be more working class. I didn’t like to tell him there were no restaurants where I came from, and nobody ‘ate out’, unless you counted the chip shop.
‘So,’ he said, after ordering me an Irish coffee and telling me I would like it, ‘I saw the cuttings of the ship that sank.’
‘And did you recognize anyone?’
‘Well, I recognized you, of course. You haven’t changed a bit!’
I laughed. ‘That’s what you think!’
He smiled and stroked my knuckles across the table. ‘Who’s the boy you’re snuggled up to?’