by Ursula Bloom
She remembered the years with that sword-sharp sentimentality, and the remembrance was steel into her soul. Twit when she had excused his obstinate, sneaking youth, Twit whom she had defended when he was ruthlessly sent to the wrong school. Later how she had fought with him over Stanley, fought over Clive. She had stood so firm in her place beside him, twin fruit on the bough that was George and Isobel.
Perhaps he had been right and she had robbed him of a certain independence, had crushed him into her own way of thinking, believing that she must know best for him. Panorama-wise the employments over which she had been his driving force filtered through her brain. The Bank. Stanley’s office. The printing office. His own attempt at the Plotherowe works, where he had succeeded. His own existence in the army, where he had made good. Then again her attempts, her urging direction. The garage. All the hundred and one little efforts.
All along she had striven to thrust her protecting body between him and the world. She had perceived only the child and not the man. We grow older. We stand upon the threshold of our wisdom, and we have a right to cross the threshold of that wisdom alone. He had gone from her. She could not believe it, and the hard bright tears sped down her cheeks. She was dismally, wretchedly alone.
She could not give way because Jill was not made of the stuff that crumples. She would go on fighting to the end, her face turned to the sun.
She got out of the car, remembering that it was Hilda’s night out and she would have the house to herself for a thorough good cry. A good cry helps a woman to continue. It helps her more than all else, and she believed now that she longed to allow herself to slide into the miasma of despair and abandon herself to her grief. Before, she had felt that it was transitory, that he would come back to her. But now she knew that he would not come back. The rupture had occurred. That which she had believed to be part of her life was purely episodic. As episode it passed into space.
She paid the man, dismissed him, and as the car drove off her body relaxed. She was aware of limpness, of collapse. She was conscious that all her men folk had deserted her, perhaps because it was her own fault, perhaps because her personality sought and searched and sucked and demanded. Yet that did not make it better. It did not assuage the loneliness. Nothing could assuage that.
‘Oh, I’m so unhappy,’ she sobbed as she stumbled up the crazy-paving path. She did not see the blue smudge of aubretia, the white flurry of arabis, the red promise of the new day peering through the birch tree. She did not see the first ripple of gay greenness down its naked boughs. She was brought up with a jerk. On the step a man was standing.
‘I’ve been knocking a hell of a time,’ said a plaintive voice. ‘I can’t make anyone hear.’
It was Jock!
V
He caught her as she pitched forward. Limpness, space, the sense of falling into some abysmal depth. Yet a sweet depth because it was his arms. Darkness enveloped her. Through its gloom spun threads of fire. Memories. They were no longer living consciousnesses, but merely the matterless spears of the past ever thrusting through what was dead and done with.
When she recovered she was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room. Beside her he knelt. He seemed grown bigger and browner, and yet rather pathetically childlike in his efforts to help her. He had fetched a bowl of water from the kitchen and was bathing her forehead with a soiled glass-cloth, which had been the only thing that he could find.
‘Oh, Jock, not that!’
‘Why not? Good as anything else.’
‘It’s a dish-wiper.’
‘I don’t care two straws.’
She saw him as a forgotten memory that had come back to her, disturbing in its simplicity. It was endearing.
‘Where’s that ass Twit?’ demanded Jock.
‘He’s left me.’
‘Oh God, I thought he would.’ His arms tightened about her as though he somehow sensed her suffering. ‘I didn’t trust him two pins. It’s all very well, but he was in the first cads’ team. You know he was.’
The old expression. She laughed. The laugh hurt more than all the tears had done. There is something very cruel about laughter. It tinkles in upon pain. It is brassy, it is brave, it is too gay a thing really to satisfy.
Then slowly she began to tell him. There was something beautiful about the firelight, and the shadows, and the deep throaty voice of the man whispering to her every little while. There was something beautiful about her tears, the flicker of the flames accompanying the soft drumming of the birch tree against the lattice window. He let her talk. He believed that this was what she needed most of all before surrendering herself to him.
He had come home with a new conception of her, with a new love for her. The old conventions no longer engulfed him. He was seeing Jill for the first time as she really was, suffering soul of Jill, sacrifice of her, loneliness, aloofness, sadness of her. Before, he had loved her with the physical desire for possession of her beauty, but now he loved her for herself. He smoothed the soft golden drift of her hair against his arm, and she smelt the old sweet smell of his tweed coat, and remembered how good it was. Twit was receding into the background. She also was seeing it anew. Her life, with something out of place, something that had escaped focus; Twit who had always been intended as background and who had stepped into the centre of the canvas. Something amiss. Something being set right.
Her story came to its close.
‘So that is the end,’ she said.
‘The end of Twit, but the beginning of Jill.’
‘We were so much to each other.’
‘No,’ said Jock resolutely, ‘not really. You loved him from a thwarted sense of duty.’
‘He is my brother.’
‘I never met two people so dissimilar.’
She nodded.
‘He never loved you, my dear. Not in that way. He’s proved it now. Let him go. He is worthless.’
She did not argue. It was truth forced home to her. She clung closer to the arms that held her. How good it was to feel him again, to have him with her.
‘We will put Twit out of our world, Jilly,’ he said; ‘in our world there shall only be two people. You and I.’
‘Perhaps that was what was wrong before?’ she said, and her hands crept lovingly about his neck.
‘You married me because you loved me, I know, but also because you thought I should not interrupt the greater love that you had for Twit,’ he told her gently, ‘but, thank God, Twit interrupted that himself.’
‘I did love you,’ she said, but she knew that in one sense he was speaking the truth.
‘I was a conventional idiot. When you told me that ‒’
‘Don’t!’ she whispered frantically and clung to him, hiding her face in the softness of his throat.
‘I must go on, Jilly dear. I’d never thought of that sort of thing connected with you. I saw only sin and it appalled me.’
She lay very still. She knew now that if he chose to abide by his conventions, she could not let him go. She would rather let herself go. She must be conventional too. She could not drive this man to think with her, tyrannise him, possess him as she had possessed the soul of Twit. She felt her body growing rigid in his hold.
‘I was blindly intolerant, my Jill. A fool. But we are all in the first fools’ team when we don’t know what we are doing. Now I’ve thought about it. You do believe me, don’t you? I’ve thought about it a lot.’
He had thought.
He had thought in those swooning nights when the white mosquito net had seemed to suffocate him. When not a frond stirred of the giant palms without. When there came the distant screaming of the cheetahs through the tropic night; the sudden onrush of wings through a painted darkness as some affrighted bird tore its frantic way through the jungle. He had thought of women as a whole. Of the physical senses and desires that can so easily overcome the urgings of the soul. He had thought of Edward Shane, of the bestiality of his marriage to Jill, and had laid the blame on those shoulders. That marria
ge duly ordered, licensed, and, because of that, smiled upon by smug humanity. He had thought of the beauty of her passionate interlude with Clive Meredith. The world condemned it because it was unhallowed by marriage. She had gloried in it for the time being. Jock saw it by strange contrast as something pure and beautiful and regular. He had realised that only by the laws of a petty civilisation could he think in any other vein. It was quite true that the episode had given her to him. Just as the marriage with Lord Shane had separated her from him. It had alienated her from normality, had made her shun all men in her horror of physical attachment.
‘I am glad you met Clive,’ he said. ‘Do you hear? I am glad.’
‘He was unworthy,’ she reminded him.
‘I daresay. That didn’t matter. He taught you love, and the emotion you rendered to him was a pure and lovely thing. Nothing else mattered.’
‘Except the fact that we were not married.’
‘The fact that you were married once is the only shocking thing in your whole life, my Jilly,’ he said. ‘I know that now. But somehow, being a simple fellow, I had only dealt in simplicities. I had not thought of there being degrees in love. You taught me to think.’
She clung closer still and lifted her mouth to his. ‘My dear, I wish I hadn’t been the one who made you think,’ she said. ‘But I’m glad. You made me human.’
He clasped her to him and kissed the gold silk of her hair soft-scented on his sleeve.
‘I came back as a surprise. I didn’t want you to steel yourself against me. I wanted my Jill. My little child. I wanted to start all over again.’
She made no answer and he saw the brightness of tears on her face. They were the sweet tears of joy, which are all happiness to suffer.
‘You do want to start again, Jilly sweet?’ he urged.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she whispered frantically. ‘Clive used to call me that.’
‘But you are my Jilly sweet. My very own. I’ll call you what I like. Tell me, darling. Isn’t it nicer when I call you it?’ He caught her to him then, holding her closely. Her face, pressed upwards to his, had the glistening sheen of pearl.
‘We are the only two people who matter,’ he said.
‘It is so beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘More beautiful for the fact that we have suffered a lot.’
‘Much more beautiful.’
They kissed. They were two travellers on life’s road who for a time had strayed and lost touch with each other, but they were united again.
The fire flickered down, and only a deeply reddy glow suffused the room. Outside the wind whispered tantalisingly to the birch tree as though it were telling again the exquisite story of the princess in the fairy tale who lived happily ever afterwards.
The clock, striking eight, stirred Jill.
‘Hilda is out. Who’s going to get the supper?’
‘I will, if you like,’ he said boldly. ‘I’ll make a dickens of a mess of it. I’m hardly in the first parlour-maid team, but if you’ll risk it …’
‘You child,’ she said and laughed as she kissed him. ‘Let’s picnic by the fire?’
‘Yes. Let’s.’
VI
It was a gay little picnic by the firelight. It was the happy meal of two children who could afford to laugh at life. It was care-free and beautiful. Bread and cheese and kisses! That was it. Yet the cold chicken looked merely grotesque perched on the pouffe. Jock upset the beetroot all over the Persian rug.
‘It’s messy, but rather marvellous,’ he said, and he laughed.
When he laughed like that his eyes twinkled. It was a schoolboy’s laugh. Whole-hearted. Infectious. She thought to herself, ‘If I had fallen in love with him for nothing else, his laugh would get me every time.’
‘You’re making a glorious mess of it all,’ she said.
‘I know I am. I haven’t dared admit that I’ve upset the beer. Bottles simply won’t stand steady on these cushions of yours.’
‘Bottles weren’t meant to stand on cushions,’ she reminded him primly.
‘I don’t care. Nothing matters. I’ve got you and you’ve got me. The whole outside world can go to Hell for all I care.’
After the long, lonely, tropical nights, when he had yearned for her, ached for her, wanted her so much. After the misunderstanding, and the division, the marriage and divorce of emotions. After everything; this. It was the exotic joy of living.
Long afterwards, when they had finished the impromptu meal and sat side by side on the sofa clinging to each other, he moved uneasily.
‘Something is uncommonly hard and I’m sitting on it. I have a nasty feeling that it may be the beer bottle.’
‘Well, move it,’ she suggested.
He felt in the soft feathery cushions and brought out the old diary that Isobel had written years ago.
‘Your library book, my dear. The library will be pleased! It’s probably all over beetroot.’
‘It isn’t a library book at all,’ she told him, ‘it’s mother’s old diary. I was reading it.’
She took it into her hands, a cumbersome volume, better bound than the tomes of to-day, the writing grown sere and old. Nearly half a century ago it had been the medium of a girl’s self-expression. Jill, opening it, turned to a particular page.
‘The family tree from which we sprang,’ she said lovingly, for she had worshipped that tree, and connected it with the birch without, had thought of it with a queer affection for its boughs and branches and little thickening twigs. ‘We were the fruit. Fruit on the bough.’
He nodded.
‘On such a night,’ he said, ‘it would be rather sweet to dip into the pages of the past. I wish I’d known your mother. What was she like?’
‘Ordinary,’ said Jill.
‘We all think our mothers ordinary. Perhaps it is because we are too close to them, so mingled with their being that we never get an objective view of them.’
‘Perhaps,’ she agreed. ‘Mother was a simple sort of person. She never had a romance or anything like that. They didn’t in those days.’
‘What about your father?’
‘You couldn’t have called him a big emotion. He was selfish and dictatorial and queer.’
‘It might have been the big emotion,’ said Jock.
‘I don’t think so somehow.’
‘And that I suppose is just because he was your father. The romances of our parents never seem real to us, do they?’ His hold tightened on her lithe young body. ‘It is only our own romances that count.’
He opened the page, the very page at which she had left off reading that afternoon when she had been waiting in a fever of anxiety to go to Twit.
‘The March before you were born,’ he said, and there was a hint of reverence in his tone. ‘It is written in Kenloch. See, where is that? Somewhere in the North, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Jill, casting a glance at the page; ‘she hated the place.’
‘She doesn’t seem to like it,’ he admitted.
‘Dad was away a lot. Mother wrote about Alan Hayne, who was a pupil. He was grown up, you know, and they seemed to have much in common. Poor Mother, she must have been lonely, because I don’t suppose a pupil could be interesting.’ Together they read the faded, yellowed old writing of the woman who had never had a romance. The woman who had been so ordinary.
March 2nd, 1893.
I wish I dare make a clean breast of everything, but I cannot. It is all wrong, wicked, terrible, yet, in spite of its very sin, it is precious. Alan means everything to me. I cannot believe that what is so lovely can be labelled by such an unlovely name. Alan says that it is not wicked. It is love.
‘My dear,’ said Jock tenderly, ‘what is all this? It doesn’t seem ordinary. It doesn’t seem like the woman without a romance?’
Jill nodded.
‘I don’t know. We never know our parents very well. Go on reading.’
He is going away and perhaps that is the best thing in the world for both of us, for I
am George’s wife and one day Alan will meet some woman who will fill that role for him. I am nothing. I do not matter. But, oh, how glad I am that I have had this love! It may be wrong, but it is the only thing worth while in my wretched, ordinary, futile life.
Jill reached out and took the book from his hands. It seemed to her that they were reading in upon some rather holy emotion. Some secret that the years had hidden from her. Some part of Isobel to which she had been blinded. Then this had happened before! This passionate, romantic something which had stirred poor Isobel at Kenloch had also flamed and fused Jill’s being in Morsegate nearly half a century later.
Jock sat there very still. There was the soft stirring of the birch tree without. At last he said:
‘What was Alan Hayne to you, Jilly?’
And her voice grown fainter with emotion replied, ‘I don’t know. I’m thinking.’
Her thoughts ran in clear strong sweeps. She was trying to pierce the impenetrable armour of the past. But the past has a way of protecting itself, of hiding its secrets deep in the very bosom of itself from which no man may pluck them out. It admits nothing.
‘There was so much difference between you and Twit,’ said Jock, staring into the heart of the fire, ‘that I wonder …’ His hand found hers, clasped it warmly, clung. ‘It sets me thinking too. Were you really twin fruit on the bough?’
Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom
Thirtysomething Ann Clements takes a Mediterranean cruise which opens her eyes to the wider world, and to herself.
London, 1934. Ann Clements is thirty-five and single, and believes nothing exciting will ever happen to her. Then, she wins a large sum of money in a sweepstake and suddenly can dare to dream of a more adventurous life. She buys a ticket for a Mediterranean cruise, against the wishes of her stern brother, the Rev. Cuthbert, who has other ideas about how she should spend her windfall.