Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  He put the second apple back, and picked up a third.

  ‘How about Damian?’ he asked. ‘How was he?’

  Jannie sighed.

  ‘Jack, Jack, Jack all day,’ she said. ‘Was it Jack who pulled the wallpaper off? Will Jack come and eat all our food up? After lunch Jack went away to stay with his Granny for a fortnight.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll have a break while he’s away.’

  ‘No, he came back from his Granny’s at teatime.’

  The name Damian had turned out to have an entirely different effect from Gawain. It had made the younger boy rather earthy and coarse. ‘Damian’ had come to signify for Dyson bulging, polished red cheeks, and slow, hoarse laughter. Damian was an imaginative child; but what he imagined was extremely boring. More than anything except perhaps eating he enjoyed running jokes, which ran for weeks, until every possible permutation and application had been exhausted. From somewhere – perhaps from something that Gawain had said, or from hearing about Jack Frost, or Jack Sprat, or Jack the brother of Jill – he had evolved an all-purpose Jack, a formless, characterless, pointless personage to whom he attributed deeds and sayings of stupefying dullness, in a daily soap opera which often ran without respite from breakfast to bedtime. Jack’s doughy presence had loomed over the family’s conversations for months. Not that Damian was unresponsive to the views of the critics. ‘Isn’t it about time we packed Jack in now, Day?’ Dyson had said once in exasperation, after listening all one Saturday afternoon to an account of what Jack had in his stomach. ‘We’re all sick and tired of him.’ ‘Jack’s packing in now,’ Damian had said thoughtfully at intervals since then. ‘Jack’s sick and tired. Jack’s sick and tired all over the floor. Jack didn’t have time to be sick and tired in the pot, so do you know, Mummy, Jack did be sick and tired all over the floor.’ Already Dyson could see the name Damian Dyson on the spine of some thick volume embodying a lifetime’s diligent pedantry, or an endless, worthy novel about feuds and forbidden passions through seven generations in a Norfolk rush-cutting community.

  ‘We should have called Damian Gawain and Gawain Damian,’ he said.

  ‘Poor Damian,’ said Jannie. ‘I feel so sorry for him sometimes.’

  ‘Do you remember when we used to meet for coffee in that seedy milk bar in Market Square? After your supervisions with that terrible man in Caius?’

  Jannie smiled, looking at the cheese-board and tapping it softly with her knife.

  ‘Ah, then,’ she said.

  Morning mist, thought Dyson, padlocks in bicycle baskets, cinemas showing old Marx Brothers films.

  ‘I saw Dick Hemming today,’ he said. ‘At Bush House.’

  ‘Dick Hemming?’

  ‘Stand-up hair, bushy eyebrows. Perhaps you never met him. In Jesus.’

  Jannie put down the knife and leaned her cheeks on her fists. She gazed at her husband intently.

  ‘He went into the BBC,’ said Dyson. ‘I see him sometimes when I go to Bush House.’

  ‘We’ve known each other almost half our lives,’ said Jannie.

  Dyson gazed back at her. It was odd to think that she was his wife. It seemed such a generalized, public category of being, dissolving her into wifeliness, allying her with goodwives, midwives, and fishwives, shutting her off in a dour sorority united in its complaints against the husband class. It was hard to think what she was like, she was so familiar. She was – well, she was Jan, she was Jannie. Looking at her, Dyson felt free and yet secure, like a small ball-bearing which has been placed upon a very wide, shallow dish, wandered easily about for some while, approaching the edges but always turning back, and eventually found its way, as if by its own sure instinct rather than by external forces acting upon it, to settle in the very centre.

  ‘I can outstare you,’ she said. Dyson dropped his gaze for an instant.

  ‘I thought I might get one of Mounce’s people to take some pictures of me,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you the BBC had a letter from a girl in Conakry asking for a picture of me?’

  Jannie said nothing, but after a while she began to laugh, still leaning on her fists and still gazing at him.

  ‘Well, they did,’ said Dyson.

  ‘How’s Bob?’ said Jannie.

  ‘Bob’s well.’

  ‘You’d better bring him back to dinner tomorrow night. He hasn’t been this week.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’ll starve.’

  ‘I’ll get a joint.’

  Rather thoughtfully, Jannie began to gather up the plates.

  ‘Did it get dark here this morning about eleven o’clock?’ asked Dyson suddenly.

  ‘I suppose it did,’ said Jannie, her mind on something else.

  ‘It was as black as night in the City. There’s a bit in the evening paper about it. I’ll fetch it for you.’

  ‘Poor Damian,’ said Jannie. ‘He even bores Gawain.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Bob, finishing up the last spoonful of fruit salad. ‘Very nice indeed.’

  Mrs Mounce might have her shortcomings, he reflected, but she certainly knew how to open a tin of fruit salad. She sat at the table opposite him, watching him eat, with a whimsical smile on her sharp little face, from time to time turning her head, drawing down the corners of her mouth, and taking another pull at her cigarette.

  ‘You enjoyed it, did you, darling?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, very nice. Thank you.’

  ‘The pleasure’s mine, sweetest. There’s nothing a woman enjoys more than cooking for a man. Especially if he really appreciates his food.’

  ‘Yes. Well, thanks, anyway.’

  She blew out smoke between her teeth.

  ‘If I’d known what time you were coming in,’ she said, ‘I’d have cooked din-dins for both of us. I could have done something really nice. Do you like crispy noodles? And prawn balls in batter? And fried spare ribs? There – you didn’t know I could do Chinese cooking, did you, sweets? Oh, yes – I’ve cooked Chinese food for experts. Do you know Mr Carlsson, who runs Carlsson Syndication Services? He’s a very big man in Far East syndication. You should get to know people like that, darling, they could help you to get on. Anyway, I gave him chicken in almonds, sweet-and-sour prawns, crispy noodles, and bamboo shoots, and you know what he said? He said, “Glenda, darling” – because he’s not a stuffy old stick-in-the-mud like you – he said, “Glenda, darling, I know the Far East intimately – Hong Kong, Singapore, the lot – and I have never, never, tasted such exquisite Chinese cooking.” ’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bob. He got up, put the dishes on the draining-board for the cleaning woman to do in the morning, and threw the various empty tins into the rubbish-bin. Mrs Mounce slid sinuously across to the armchair, and curled herself up to watch the television, where a girl with long blonde hair was busy shooting a solemn-faced man in a dark overcoat.

  ‘I’d ask you downstairs,’ she said, ‘but my darling hubby would be livid if he found out I’d been having men friends in. He’s jealousy incarnate, you’d never believe.’

  She gazed at the screen, narrowing her eyes against the smoke she was blowing out. Bob lay down on the bed, and belched discreetly. He remembered that he had a letter from Tessa in his pocket, which he had picked up off the hall table on his way upstairs. He took it out and slit the envelope.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Mrs Mounce.

  ‘A letter.’

  ‘From anyone special?’

  ‘No.’

  He unfolded the thick wad of blue paper, each sheet densely covered with neat round handwriting. He turned to the last page. It was numbered twelve. He sighed, and turned back to page one. The Rectory, Staple Tarland, Somerset, it said. Tel. Staple Tarland 17. Monday.

  ‘Bob my darling, Bob my dearest,’ began the letter. ‘I miss you most dreadfully, really dreadfully, much more than I ever thought possible. It’s now three whole weeks since you were here, 21 days 19 hours and 12 minutes to be exact, and it seems like three centuries. There is really nothing else to say . . .’


  ‘Do you like jealousy in a woman?’ asked Mrs Mounce.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think it’s nice for someone to be jealous, within reason. You know where you stand.’

  ‘. . . really nothing else to say,’ said the letter, ‘but I will recount the boring chronicle of my days so you can see just how much your silly T. does miss you. Honestly, I mope about the house like a sick cow. Mummy says I have become impossible to live with, and even Daddy has noticed. He says it must be love, so you can see he notices more than you give him credit for. I mean, he knows I’m having An Affair with you, but he’s no idea exactly quelle affaire it is.’

  Bob felt a familiar sensation, as if he were shrinking inside his clothes, or sinking slowly through the surface of the earth. He tried to fight it off, and skipped a couple of paragraphs.

  ‘Mummy says I must go to the Rothensteins’ on the 30th, if only out of common courtesy, and that I shall enjoy it once I get there. I say phooey to that, because I know I shall be unutterably bored without YOU there to Entertain and Delight me, but I suppose I shall have to go in the end, even though it means going back to college a couple of days late, and there are exams this term (Social Dynamics, World Literature, and History of Ideas I – groan, groan!). Anyway, they (the Rothensteins, that is!) live near Taskerton, and have Pots and Pots of Money. Well, Daddy has thought of one of his Awful Romantic Ideas, that A and I should make up a party with the two Gillington boys and ride over! I ask you! Can you imagine A and I riding side-saddle in our ball-gowns?’

  Not only could Bob not imagine it, but he couldn’t remember which one A was. The Rectory was full of Tessa’s sisters, all kindly and romantic and fond of animals, and all called A or V or G or B. It was like a department of the Secret Service.

  ‘But Daddy says V could take our dresses over in the car, since her pony Jester is lame anyway, and anyway she despises riding as much as I feel I ought to in this day and age, though I must confess that as you know I do get a tiny guilty sneaking pleasure out of it.’

  Bob laid the letter down. He couldn’t conceal it from himself; he was embarrassed. All Tessa’s letters made him sweat with embarrassment. She wasn’t like that to talk to. But then she wasn’t as articulate when she talked. Her handiness with the pen might mean that her letters tapped the real Tessa within. Could he in all honesty continue an affair with a girl who wrote letters like this?

  ‘Bad news?’ asked Mrs Mounce.

  ‘No,’ said Bob. ‘Yes and no.’

  He turned over a couple of sheets and took a sounding on page five.

  ‘I think you must have made quite an impression on Daddy during your visit here. He didn’t mention you at all until last Saturday, and I thought he must have forgotten about you altogether. Then suddenly out of the blue, while we were having tea, he asked which school you had been to. I had to say I didn’t know, because strange to say you’ve never told me, and he said H’mph. And I said but you’d been to Cambridge, and he said Ha. Which coming from him is high praise, or at any rate a sign of some interest. You know how hard it is to get him interested in anything these days except the Liberal Party and German theology. No, I’m making him sound like some grouchy old eccentric, and he’s really a very sweet and saintly man, and I adore him, second only to you. Incidentally, which school did you go to?’

  He skimmed through a few more pages, trying to see if they contained anything he was supposed to do something about – an invitation, a question which needed to be answered, a rendezvous. Tessa’s letters always made him anxious. Somewhere in that sea of words there might be some vital message bobbing about that he was failing to pick up. One evening she would arrive at the front door of his flat – he knew it. His face would fall in astonishment. ‘Oh Bob!’ – ‘Oh God!’ – ‘Oh Bob, I did write!’ He felt a flutter of indigestion at the thought.

  ‘It’s a funny thing about jealousy,’ said Mrs Mounce. ‘I’m quite broad-minded about Reg, but I can be as jealous as a cat, darling, believe me.’

  Bob tracked backwards again through the text. Somewhere there should be an acknowledgment of his last letter. It had been rather an amusing one, he thought.

  ‘. . . wonderful to get your letter. I carried it around unopened for at least an hour, inside my shirt, next to my heart. What a sloppy thing to do! Really I am a dreadfully sloppy person, not fit to know you. What does “sirjaspery” mean? I looked it up in the Shorter Oxford, but no sign. You wrote: “Oho then my proud beauty, he cried in sirjaspery tones.” I think it must mean something like syrupy, with overtones of jasmine and raspberry. Am I right? And who is Captain Cosmo, master of the space-ship Staphylococcus? Is he a character I ought to know about? Or did you make him up? Oh, I feel such a fool reading your letters, and so unworthy of you. How can you bear to put up with me? I tried to read Miss Lonelyhearts as you suggested, but it was so miserable I gave up. I’m ploughing through A Face in the Crowd, which I must say is very interesting in its revelations about what goes on in “the communications industry”. I’ve even got the library to get me U.S.A. by John dos Passos, but it’s so enormous I can’t imagine ever getting through it. It would take me all year just to read the books you mentioned when we happened to be talking about American literature. I shall never have read anything like as many books as you, however hard I try. Sometimes I despair. This is the only way I regret being nine years younger than you. You’ll always be nine years ahead of me in reading and in knowledge of the world. Do you mind, dearest Bob? I know you mind. I know it irritates you when I don’t understand, or don’t recognize an allusion. Oh, I am a stupid child, and I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m almost sorry we met, I know I must irritate you so much . . .’

  Bob put the letter down and stared at the ceiling, overcome with sadness and shame.

  ‘What I’m going to do, sweetest,’ said Mrs Mounce, ‘is to get a spare key to this flat from Dotty.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Bob, thinking about his unworthiness.

  ‘Then I can slip in before you get home from the office sometimes and have something ready for you.’

  Bob went on thinking.

  ‘A man needs someone to look after him a little, darling. Someone to spoil him occasionally.’

  Bob sighed. Mrs Mounce jumped out of the armchair and dimpled across to the bed.

  ‘You don’t sound very grateful, sweety pie,’ she said, making a reproachful moue. She sat down on the edge of the bed. Bob pulled his knees up to make room for her, and she leaned on them, her cigarette hand still aloft. Bob looked away, feeling low.

  ‘I think he’s a tiny bit scared of me, chaps,’ she said. ‘I think he thinks I’ve got wicked designs on him.’

  Bob tried to smile. Mrs Mounce pushed her chin forward teasingly.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling – I shan’t bite you,’ she purred. She sucked in cigarette smoke, and let it out slowly, gazing at him through it with half-closed eyes.

  ‘Or perhaps I will!’ she said suddenly, and in the same moment leant forward and sank her teeth into Bob’s leg, just above the knee.

  ‘Arrrrrgh!’ he shouted, springing up. The bite was astonishingly painful.

  Mrs Mounce had jumped up, too, and was streaking away to the door, laughing.

  ‘I thought that might wake you up, sweetheart!’ she said. ‘Night night!’

  Dyson lay in bed, glancing through the book reviews in the Statesman, waiting for Jannie to come to bed and turn the light out. ‘Glyn’s slow disintegration and inevitable breakdown are magnificently handled . . . Magda, abandoned by her lieutenant, goes to live with a senescent baron in his crumbling schloss in the Thuringer Wald; the atmosphere of decay and elderly lust is picturesquely conveyed . . . Riki’s growing sense of isolation and despair is convincingly done, but her final breakdown seems a long time coming . . .’ Dyson relished the reviews, the texture of the sheets and the softness and warmth of the bed. Outside 43 Spadina Road the world was senescent, disintegrating, despairing, and everyone was on his way to a breakdown. Ins
ide, it was soft and warm and linen-sheeted, and everyone was in the pink of mental health. Jannie moved slowly about the room in her pyjamas, vaguely shifting heaps of clothes about. The whole room was full of heaps of clothes – his, Jannie’s, the children’s; some put out for cleaning, some for sending to the refugees, some to be decided about. We must get another chest of drawers, he thought luxuriously. It gave him great pleasure to see all the clothing about the room. Hundredweights of it – and all provided out of his earnings. Shirts, socks, dresses, stockings; silver dance shoes and thick winter overcoats – all quarried by his own labour. The bed itself; the butter downstairs in the refrigerator; the electricity they burned so casually; the telephone; the complex structure of beams and bricks and slates that housed it all; he, John Dyson, thought by some as a boy to be rather a fool, had got it all. Had got it by his sheer ability at maintaining the crossword stock, at checking points of theology and country lore, at explaining the intricacies of British politics to West Africans with lucidity and wit and some small measure of personal charm. Life was rich and satisfying.

  Slowly Jannie got into bed, sighing at the clothes, and switched the light off. He put his head on her shoulder, and for a while she stroked his eyebrows. He wondered if he had Jannified her at all by calling her Jannie, as he had Gawained Gawain. As a girl she had been Janice, and no one had tried to shorten it. Janice Atterbury. He thought of her going off to school each day on a green double-decker bus, a Janice among Janices, a Janice Atterbury among Janice Leighs, Vivienne Williamses, Heather Marshalls, and Sandra Thompsons. Janice, you can share my crayons if you promise you won’t let Heather have them. Janice Atterbury is a stuck-up pig. Atterbury, J. D., did useful work at left back, but must mark her man and tackle more aggressively. Janice Dorothy Atterbury has satisfied the Examiners in German (Written and Oral), Pianoforte (Grade V), Ballet (Intermediate), and Life Saving (Royal Humane Society Bronze Medal) . . .