What Was Rescued

by Jane Bailey

  I looked up, startled.

  ‘In a book!’

  ‘Let me see.’ She handed me my passport. It had been buried under the gloves and trowels and other gardening knick-knacks in a box on a shelf in an outhouse. Now I knew for certain. My fury transformed itself into something like fear. I had known from the moment Ralph showed me the empty drawer, but I had kept a little hope for other explanations, had tried so hard to let him off the hook. But soon all fear was taken over by elation, as I slipped the slim booklet into my blouse. ‘Thank you. I wondered where that had got to.’

  She eyed me curiously. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Sort of. Identity papers. Are you going to put that glove on and help me?’

  She sighed. ‘There are so many boxes here. You never know what you’re going to find in a box.’

  We made twenty fat lavender bags and fourteen little ones, each tied up with coloured ribbon. I made a decision not to tell Claudine and Patsy about my plans. I was afraid one of them might unwittingly give the game away, but it meant I couldn’t say goodbye. At least, I reasoned, I would be able to tell them when we got to the station, and I could explain exactly how things were with Ralph and they would understand. It was going to be an emotional farewell, but I could think of no other way.

  I went to bed that night with the fragrant smell of lavender and the even more enticing scent of freedom. My pulse galloped like that of a prisoner poised for escape. I pictured where all the items were that I hadn’t yet packed and how I would gather them swiftly after breakfast tomorrow. Then I would slip my suitcase into the boot of the car, and Patsy would drive me to the way home.

  The following morning, I rose while Ralph was still asleep. I left the suitcase under my bed and went down to make breakfast. I put the milk on to boil, cut bread and made coffee. Ralph emerged sleepily and went out on to the terrace where Claudine was already laying the table in the shade of the house. I was so excited. I remember trying to stop my hand from trembling as I poured hot milk on to the coffee in Ralph’s bowl and on to the chocolate in Claudine’s. Patsy arrived and took over, gabbling curses to Denis as he put his feet up on the table and moved the cloth. It seemed to go on forever, but eventually Ralph made his move to the study and I sloped up to our room for the suitcase and put it into the boot of the car.

  My relief – I can feel it now – was so mixed with adrenaline that it was a heady feeling. I pottered about in the kitchen, waiting for Patsy to tell me she was ready. Before she arrived, Ralph came into the kitchen: ‘Change of plan. Patsy’s not taking you to Montélimar.’

  ‘What? But I—’

  ‘I am.’

  Something seemed to wrap itself around my stomach and squeeze hard. I could taste the apricot jam I’d had for breakfast in my throat.

  ‘I need to go to the bank, and Patsy’s happy to take you to Montélimar next week instead.’

  I tried not to look disappointed. I could hear my own pulse in my head. He must have seen me put the suitcase in the car. I could still go. He couldn’t stop me. How could he stop me? I pictured a struggle on the platform. What if he’d already removed the suitcase? I still had my winter coat and shoes back in Wales. I would manage. I eyed my handbag on the kitchen chair and folded my lips together, afraid of the words that might come out if I opened them. In the bag were my passport and the money he’d given me. They were in there for certain – I had checked the moment before he came into the kitchen. I picked up my handbag. It might be all I took home with me on the voyage, but he wasn’t going to stop me. I was getting out of there and I was going home.

  He said very little on the way to the station. When I looked across at him his jaw was clamped shut, and I knew – from the twitches in the hollows of his cheek – that he was angry. I made small talk, for my own benefit rather than his, because I couldn’t bear the silence. I was so convinced that he knew of my plans that when we parked at the station I went straight to the boot and opened it, calculating that, if I had the suitcase in my hand and he tried to wrench it from me, people might come to my aid.

  I still don’t know for certain if he had guessed my intentions, but he gave a very convincing appearance of astonishment. ‘Why on earth have you brought that? What are you playing at?’

  ‘I’m not playing, Ralph. I’m going back to England to finish my course.’

  The thick dark eyebrows came down and the nostrils flared. ‘You said you were just buying the ticket today.’

  ‘You said that.’

  ‘But your course doesn’t start until next week.’

  I looked at his fury. My hands were weak and sweating. I had nothing to say.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  And suddenly I knew I didn’t have to explain myself to him. He talked to me like a schoolmaster admonishing a wayward child, but I had every right to return to England. I moved away from him decisively in the direction of the ticket office. No one else was waiting and I bought my ticket to Calais.

  ‘C’est pour aujourd’hui?’

  I swallowed hard. ‘Oui.’

  The man behind the guichet asked if I wanted a single or return. I could feel Ralph at my shoulder, but I asked for a single. ‘Un aller simple,’ I muttered. The man told me about the changes I would need to make and that there was a train to Paris running late if I wanted to get that one.

  The ticket was slipped under the glass and I snatched it like a child in danger of losing a balloon. With that voucher for freedom securely in my purse I marched out on to the platform. Ralph followed.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Running away like a thief in the night . . . When was I going to find out? Didn’t you even plan to say goodbye? Is that your thanks for my taking you to the south of France?’

  He could hardly draw breath. There was such rage in him that I instinctively backed away. He came right up to me, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

  I pushed his hands away. ‘You told me we were going to France for a holiday. You lied to me. You lied to me, Ralph.’ It felt good, telling him that. It felt good, but I was still afraid. I was aware of a bunch of other people on the platform (uncomfortably looking away from us, but there, nonetheless) and I was grateful for that delayed Paris train. ‘I’m not your prisoner. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d try to stop me.’

  I turned and faced the platform, gripping the suitcase in my trembling hand and clutching my handbag tightly against my torso. Then something rather bizarre happened.

  As I waited, wondering what he was going to do next, I heard him catch his breath in an unfamiliar way. I could feel my heart pounding inside my ribs. My head was aching. I longed to shove him away, but I feared he might throttle me, there and then, in front of the other waiting passengers. You heard of things like that happening in France: men would be acquitted for murder if it was considered a crime of passion . . .

  Eventually he grabbed my shoulder and turned me round. I was about to push him away when he sobbed my name. His face was contorted in grief.

  ‘Please, Dora, please, I beg you, don’t leave me like this. I didn’t mean for you to feel imprisoned . . . I just love you . . . so much!’

  The train heralded its arrival with a distant hoot. I couldn’t believe the look in Ralph’s sad eyes. There was suddenly so much tenderness, such a transformation. I put my suitcase down and wrapped my arms around him. The noise of the approaching train was growing louder. It seemed like a warning. No! Don’t weaken. Louder, louder, and a long screech of brakes. The steam enveloped us, and in its cover I grabbed my case and ran for a door. A man with a briefcase held it open for me, and I scrambled in, holding my own case in front of me, and made my way in a rushed, ungainly fashion down the carriage to the nearest compartment with an empty seat in it. I was helped to lift my luggage on to the overhead rack. When I sat down, Ralph was banging on the window. Embarrassed, and afraid he would get on to the train and make a scene, I made my way out of the compartmen
t and back to the train door. In a hurry to get this late train on its journey, the signalman had already slammed the door and was busy slamming others, working his way down the length of the platform. To my horror, Ralph opened the door and got on.

  ‘I know you love me, Dora. Don’t let this silly misunderstanding stop you coming back. Say you’ll come back.’ He squeezed me very tight and I was afraid and confused. He was kissing my neck and holding my buttock and, when he suddenly grabbed my face between his hands, I saw that tears were making his eyes glisten. ‘I’m sorry I upset you; I just didn’t want to lose you! I love you so much, Dora!’

  The signalman came up and babbled angrily at Ralph and at the open door. Ralph backed off the train and the door was slammed shut between us. A whistle was blown, long and loud. Through the open window he grabbed my hand. ‘I want to have children with you, Dora . . . Dora . . . do you understand what I’m saying? I can look after you . . . you won’t need to teach . . . I want to spend the rest of my life with you!’

  The train emitted a laconic thud, then chugged with increasing enthusiasm. Ralph’s sad, contrite face tilted to one side like a puppy dog, his wet brown eyes imploring me to forgive him, to love him, to be his woman. And as he grew smaller, so my confusion grew. I watched him shrink before my eyes to a mere dot on a distant platform, and I couldn’t help feeling that I had done that: I had shrunk him.

  29

  ARTHUR

  ‘Heavens to Betsy! There it goes again! Look at it!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look!’

  Pippa grabbed my hand at the breakfast table and placed it firmly on her belly. ‘Can you feel it?’

  I felt my child wriggle and kick for the first time. Until that moment, none of it had seemed real. Now I had a child; I was a father. A rush of pride went through me, and I noticed something extraordinary: Pippa was smiling. In fact, she had seemed a great deal happier since we had come back from London. She sang around the house. She had a meal ready for me when I came home, and there was less often a pile of dishes in the sink. Sometimes, now, she even smiled at me, and I mean the sort of smile that wasn’t prompted by sarcasm. I couldn’t imagine what had come over her, of course, but I was pleased.

  Our little trip to London seemed to have proved a success all round. She had returned in better spirits and I had had a chance to make up to my parents. I say ‘make up to’ because I had done them a terrible wrong, I think, getting married to Pippa when they were expecting me to marry Dora, and cutting them out of the picture.

  I had sat beside my mother on the sofa when I visited, while my father was shaving one morning. I recalled Philip entwined in her arms here many years ago. Philip the baby, the beloved. How I hated myself for my sibling jealousy, even now. The room seemed filled with pictures of him, prominently displayed, although actually, I think there were only three, and I was in two of them. My mother listened to my sad story and placed a hand on mine.

  ‘We thought Dora was lovely. We were sad when we heard you weren’t marrying her, but only because we thought she’d make you such a loving wife. You seemed so right together. But if you’re happy with Pippa, then we’re happy too. We only want you to be happy, Arthur. That’s all that matters to us.’ She squeezed my hand and I tried not to blink because my eyes were welling unexpectedly. ‘You are happy, aren’t you?’ I didn’t answer. I swallowed and nodded. The pressure on my hand again. No words, but an understanding. I wanted to entwine myself like Philip. Instead I gave her a hug. ‘She has beautiful eyes,’ she said reassuringly. ‘You’re going to have a beautiful child.’

  Now Pippa waltzed around the house, a new woman. If my mother could have seen her, all sadness would have lifted. I began to feel hopeful myself. She even let me hold her in bed and stroke her back – although that was all. But I was hopeful.

  ‘Did you ask Daphne about whether Dora was coming to the wedding?’ she asked breezily one morning at breakfast.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got around to it yet.’

  ‘Well, don’t bother; there’s no need.’

  I looked at her, quizzically. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because . . .’ She was savouring the moment. ‘She won’t be there.’

  I began to panic. What could have happened? Was she alive? I thought of that little note again. Were Pippa and Dora in contact? Had Pippa said something to her? My stomach tightened. I looked at my newspaper and tried to sound nonchalant: ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because . . . she’s living in France.’ She sounded triumphant. Even in my peripheral vision I could tell she looked triumphant.

  ‘France?’ I had to catch my breath.

  ‘Yes! The London gossip is that she ran off to live with someone I vaguely know. Someone who’s set to inherit a fortune.’

  I had to put the paper down because it was shaking, and the little trembles in my hand translated into giant shudders at the edges of the paper. ‘I wonder you didn’t marry him, then.’ I surprised myself when this slipped out, but she only laughed.

  ‘I doubt Ralph Rowanwood will inherit unless he stops his silly revolutionary ideas. Apparently he’s set up a commune in the south of France and little Dora has gone with him.’

  ‘Well, good for her,’ I managed.

  ‘So you can go to the wedding without me if you want. Get a bit drunk. Loosen up a bit. Do you good.’ She was Madame Bountiful, she was beaming, she was relaxed, and I couldn’t help wondering – given the apparent lack of passion I inspired in my wife – what had passed between her and Dora to make Pippa so relieved to have her out of the way for good.

  I heard nothing else that my wife said to me after breakfast that morning. I caught the bus in a daze. Nothing I had eaten was being digested, and nothing I had heard either. It made for an uncomfortable journey. I changed buses without noticing, and I arrived at work half unconscious that I had done so. It was the busiest of times. I had an office of trainee engineers to oversee and two trained engineers who reported to me. One of these approached me with a roll of paper and a design question the moment I hung my coat on the door. I said I would be right with him, and asked my secretary if she could bring a cup of tea to my study. She looked confused: I never asked for tea this early in the morning.

  Alone for a few moments, I forced myself to assess things. Despite my shock and my unaccountable feelings of desperation and grief, the truth was that Dora had been lost to me from the moment I betrayed her. The only problem was that I had been unable to accept that. In some fantastical corner of my mind she had remained vibrant and loyal and longing and mine. That she hadn’t been there with me all this time had seemed almost irrelevant. I had conjured her up, a yearning, playful, tender lover, and therefore she was real. But now . . . now there could be no more self-delusion. Dora was gone. She had made a conscious decision to be out of my life, to be as far away as possible.

  It hit me suddenly, as I took the first sip of tea I didn’t want, how afraid I had been of seeing Dora again and being unable to stop myself from wanting her, from touching her, from betraying Pippa. Now I need worry no more. Yes, that was the way to look at it. I left the cup of tea on my desk and went out of my study and into the drafting office to face the day.

  ‘It’s not probably for the best; it definitely is.’ Len sipped his beer, perched at the bar of a large, noisy pub he had brought me to. ‘Everything will change when the baby’s born – you’ll see. Being a father – there’s nothing quite like it.’

  ‘I’m not sure Pippa is ready to be a mother.’

  ‘You wait and see.’

  There was some music playing in a room upstairs – folk night, it seemed. Len and I drank beer after beer. He told me intimate things about his wife, and I told him that all I saw of mine these days was her back. A beer or two later he was telling me what I could do with a back, and soon after that I rushed to the gents’ and was sick in a toilet and on the floor.

  When I got home that night I felt purged. I tried a few of Len’s hints on t
he curved back in bed beside me, and was batted off like a fly.

  30

  DORA

  At Calais I bought a ferry ticket, relieved that I still had the money that Ralph had given me for the journey home, and I reflected on how my handbag with its money and passport was all that stood between me and destitution on the streets of Paris or Calais. In fact, it wasn’t the fear of destitution that made me cling so tightly to my bag and case, but the fear of not getting back and seeing Arthur again.

  I won’t go into details, but you can imagine how I felt on that crossing. It brought it all back: travelling alone, a sea crossing, a calm day. It was the waiting to embark that was the worst of it. The morning sun shone at exactly the same slant, with exactly the same crisp glow on the calm sea as it had twelve years before. I half expected to see The City of India waiting in the docks. The cross-Channel ferry was a very different affair, but its modest size did nothing to cancel out the hugeness of the sea, threateningly calm and visible from each deck. I found a seat inside, clutched my bag tightly and closed my eyes, startled to be listening to English words from the loudspeakers: Perry Como singing ‘Hello, Young Lovers’.

  I caught the train from Dover to London and then from London to Cheltenham. I decided to call by Ralph’s house before I went back to Wales, just to see if I still had my room as arranged. I had phoned in advance so Jenny was expecting me, and we spent a couple of days together, settling me in for the new term. It was odd being back there, living in Ralph’s house without Ralph. Jenny told me that his father had visited to see about letting out the ground-floor flat, but that nothing had been done about it. I asked what he had been like, Ralph’s father, and she rolled her eyes: ‘You know, posh.’

  So we had the run of the house, the pair of us, and I could see that Jenny had been enjoying it for some time. Her laundry was pegged up in his kitchen, and her magazines were strewn across Ralph’s living room. I couldn’t resist a snoop around his bedroom, although I hardly dared to touch anything in case he somehow appeared at my shoulder. I did leaf through a few things on the floor beside his bed, though. Books and papers were piled scruffily next to and under the bed. They were mostly copies of his self-published ‘magazine’, Plight. I was about to walk away, guilty at my intrusion, when I spotted something familiar. A dark red cover, battered and creased at one edge where it had been thrown under the bed. I fished it out. I smoothed the cover back into some sort of shape. He had gone to France without it, without any of his ‘research’ materials, and yet he was planning not to come back. Had he ever intended to write that book, or was it yet another project he started but couldn’t see through? I will probably never know.