Most Loving Mere Folly

by Edith Pargeter

  ‘Oh, wouldn’t you, indeed? What big talk we’re getting from you, young man, these days! I’ll have things as I want them in my own house, thank you very much, and if you don’t like it you’d better get on out. You’re going to be late again, anyhow, if you don’t get along soon.’

  He saw that he had annoyed her, but because of his own inexplicable sense of outrage he could not be sorry. He knew he was behaving badly, and had better get his half-baked ideas straightened out in his own mind before he began throwing them at her. He didn’t know what was the matter with him, going off without warning like this. He was as taken aback as she was, and a good deal more upset.

  ‘But you’re not having them as you want them,’ he said perversely. ‘You’re breaking your neck getting them up like you think Mrs. Ferriday’d like them – or anyhow, so that you can shut her mouth with them. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with what you want.’ He turned his shoulder on her, because he knew he was putting himself more spitefully in the wrong with every word, and he thought he had better go, before he did worse.

  ‘What a bad-tempered little brat you’re turning out to be lately,’ she said warmly. ‘Nothing around here seems to satisfy you, these days. None of us does anything right for you. I think you’d better go and set up on your own, the sooner the better, and see if Iris can please you, since we can’t.’

  He took his coat, and flung out of the house as if he considered himself the offended party. Perhaps he was, from the moment that she laid her finger upon the sore spot by sheer accident, and accused him roundly of what was his disease. ‘Nothing around here seems to satisfy you, these days.’ Did she suppose he liked going unsatisfied? Especially when he hadn’t the least idea what was missing from his diet! How could it be true that it had anything to do with those Freeland people? It was only thinking about the vases that had brought them back into his mind. And yet he had sometimes found himself going over and over the words and actions of that disruptive evening, as we do dissect the occasions which have left us feeling inadequate, to see if we cannot arrive at some rearrangement of the facts more flattering to ourselves. Sometimes, with frequent repetition of the doctored version, it is possible to adopt it as the truth, and relinquish the recollection of those bits which fail to fit in. But he hadn’t managed it where the Freelands were concerned. The man had been a capricious drunk, and the woman an uncivil slattern, who didn’t even subscribe to the elementary rules of human conduct, such as being polite to visitors. He wasn’t in any doubt about what they were. Then why should they still, even in recollection, be able to make him feel a miserable, inexperienced bumpkin?

  It was the slight to himself he still felt most keenly. Never before had he found himself marooned in a situation like that, where even his attempts to follow the language looked gauche and obvious, while those two daunting people, not particularly impressive, not very well-off, probably not even very gifted, yet strode through the complexities of their whole difficult world with so much assurance and conviction. Why, the damned woman had even made it seem right and inevitable that she should apologise for nothing and be ashamed of nothing, so superbly justified had she felt herself to be in her preoccupation with more important things than either her husband or Dennis Forbes.

  He dug his hands deeply into his pockets, and walked quickly, along the neat, white-kerbed roads of the housing estate, trying to leave his dissatisfaction behind him. What on earth had got into his vision, that he could compare his own clean, decent home, and wholesome, respectable family with those intellectual tramps, and make his own world come out of it on the debit side? It didn’t make sense. And his mother was right, as usual, he was late for his appointment with Iris. Serve him right if she hadn’t waited, he thought, with a leap of his heart which felt incredibly like a convulsion of hope; but he knew she would wait.

  She was standing on the corner, close to Haddow’s window, when he reached the town centre. He saw the bright red of her new winter coat as soon as he turned into the street, and knew the prim way she stood, toes just lined to the edge of the kerb, bag tightly under her arm, looking self-consciously before her with that bright, painfully unconcerned look, trying to make herself believe that no one knew she was waiting for a young man, and the young man was late. Why should it be more humiliating to wait for him than to make him wait for her? But Iris hedged her life about with hundreds of little pretences, fending off the constant small disappointments and discomfitures which beset the path of the commonplace, by asserting that they simply did not happen, or if that could not be maintained any longer, that they did not affect her, that she was above them. She was one of the great majority who have to protect themselves by such psychological evasions, being without any special natural armour of her own.

  Another kind of girl would have waited there, he thought, with head reared, frankly looking along the street for him, perhaps would have frowned her annoyance at him when he appeared, and charged him outright with his unpunctuality. Iris didn’t risk that. She came a few steps to meet him, with a relieved but injured smile, tightly magnanimous, and slipped her small, gloved hand in his arm. They fell into step together as they said: ‘Hullo!’ and he added rather glumly: ‘Sorry I’m late!’

  It was more than she could rely on getting out of him these days, and she was grateful for it. ‘Oh, well!’ she said, surprised into too rash a concession. ‘I know there must be a good reason.’ So much of her conversation these days began with: ‘Oh, well!’ that it amounted to a confession of her perpetual need to make the best of a state of affairs by no means satisfactory.

  ‘What shall we do?’ he asked, halting on the corner, where one road led away to the preposterous little park, and one into the main shopping street. ‘Do you want to go to the pictures this afternoon? May not be many more Saturdays as nice as this.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a few bits of shopping to do, if you don’t mind. I wouldn’t be long. Then I thought we could have a little walk, and get tea early, and go to the pictures after. If that’s all right with you?’

  He made no objection, though he hated shopping; it was one of those things he’d got to get used to, sooner or later. She abandoned him outside two or three shops in their progress through the crowded streets, and her last call was at a draper’s in the square, close beside the garden which bordered the plain brick museum and art gallery. While he waited for her he strolled along to look at the late asters and the last of the fuchsias, and then to read, no more than the surface of his mind following his eyes, the notices on the board outside the door. There was always some little art show on there, and sometimes an evening lecture on some item of the town collection, or a piano recital on Sunday afternoon. This week, it seemed, there was an exhibition—

  Now why did she have to crop up again, just when he was forgetting he’d ever seen her and her pottery? There it was: ‘Modern English Pottery by Suspiria Freeland’, and the hours of opening; and somewhere inside there, he thought, was the real secret, if he knew how to look at it, the thing she lived by and for. He suddenly felt strongly how much more satisfied he might be if he understood about the pots, and how fine it must be to know about any amount of things – not in the sense of having a lot of facts by heart, but to know to your own content, to have authority in your own mind. Saturday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.! This was the last day of the exhibition, and he was presented with the opportunity too late. He stood staring at the notice with an intent frown, wondering if he might not be passing by for good the only road there would ever be to one extension of his personality.

  Close to his shoulder, following his fixed stare, Iris exclaimed: ‘Why, that’s that woman you know – Mrs. Freeland!’

  He looked too late and too long at the fuchsias, and then said too quickly, as his eyes returned to the notice: ‘Oh, yes – so it is! I don’t know her, though. I only saw her that once, really, and that was enough.’

  He knew that the tone was not quite what he had intended, even before Iris’s insinuating ha
nd had crept into the crook of his arm. She was looking from the poster to his face, with long, slow, sidelong looks; and in a moment she said, at once too brightly and too warily: ‘If you want to see it, we could go in there, instead of going for a walk. We’ve got plenty of time before tea.’

  The very thought turned his inside to ice. Never in her life would Iris have thought honestly of paying to go into an art gallery. No, what she wanted was to see what it was that was eating into him. She was quick to feel any new tension in him; she had to be, after all the work she’d put in on him. If there was anything funny going on in his mind about that woman and her work, Iris felt she had better find out at once what it was, and study how to deal with it. What he couldn’t understand was why it should seem to him so horrifying a prospect, having to lead a suspicious and watchful Iris round a few stands of pottery which neither of them would know how to criticise or approve. But he swung her away from the gallery with an almost violent gesture of repudiation.

  ‘What, me? Waste a fine afternoon on those things? At a bob a time? Not much! Come on, let’s get out of town for an hour or so, while we can.’

  She went with him docilely enough, but the hand continued with insistent, reminding pressures in his arm, and as they crossed the street by the Post Office corner she looked up into his face with an uneasy smile, and asked almost soundlessly in his ear: ‘Love me?’ It was a trick she had when she wanted to point out to him how deeply he was committed to the situation. The more blithely she asked it, the more gingerly was she feeling the crackling of the ice under her feet. Every: ‘Yes, don’t be silly!’ every: ‘Of course I do!’ erected another acutely pointed thorn in the way of his retreat. And yet what else can a fellow say, attacked like that in the middle of the street?

  ‘You shouldn’t ask questions like that in the middle of a zebra crossing. You’ll have us under a bus!’

  Once on the opposite pavement she said, pouting: ‘I don’t believe you do!’

  ‘I shan’t much longer, anyhow, if you get me cut off in my prime. Have you finished now?’ He meant the shopping, but it sounded to her ominously like an ultimatum in the matter of her artful complaint against him; so she let the subject slide for the moment, though she did not forget it. After all, nothing was lost yet. Even the easiest of men turns obstinate now and again; the thing to do is to pretend not to notice it, give him no occasion to dig in his heels and turn the playful contention into a real one. So she skipped along beside him towards the open fields and the long green walk of Church Lane, and began to be brisk and talkative about the whist drive at the Social Club last night, and – with elaborate artlessness – about the arrangements for her cousin’s wedding, which was to take place at Christmas. A week or two ago he might have missed the implication; he did not miss it now.

  They came back into the edge of the town for tea, over which she presided with a conscious grace and dexterity, still nudging him, with every show of old familiarity with his likes and dislikes, into a due acceptance of his position. Then they went to the pictures, and sat in the back row, which again was a kind of unofficial acknowledgment of the regularity of their attachment. Iris marched in there firmly, leading Dennis by the hand, for he was always blinder in the sudden dark than she; and soon her shoulder was fitted closely into the hollow of his, and her head was feeling for its comfortable rest against his cheek. He put his arm round her, because it was the only way to establish his own comfort in that position, but it did not seem to her to fold round her shoulders as satisfactorily as usual.

  Moving her lips against his cheek, she asked in the merest breath of a voice: ‘Love me?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ exploded Dennis, in a voiceless scream of exasperation, suddenly throwing every instinct of placatory caution headlong in the dark.

  He heard her gasp and hold her breath, felt her rigid against him for a moment with shock and fright. Then, silently, she began to cry, and went on and on until he thought she would still be sniffling into her handkerchief when the lights went up. He was almost grateful that it was a sloppy film in any case, and the few rows in front of them were moist with more vicarious tears. He supposed, without cynicism, that it would hardly be possible for the casual eye to distinguish between tears caused by that sickening little girl on the screen and those caused by Dennis Forbes. So he let her alone, rightly judging that any attempts at comfort or intimidation would only involve him in a scene difficult enough anywhere, but almost impossible here in the dark, surrounded by strangers at uncomfortably close quarters. If he apologised and said he did love her, the relief would keep her in tears for ages, and the noise might get out of hand. If he told her to shut up and stop making a fool of herself, despair would produce the same effect. Left in suspense, she was at least stealthily quiet about it, for fear of driving him to extremes. She wanted him to know she was crying, but to be reassuringly aware that as yet no one else knew it. And after all, what had he done? It was due to happen sooner or later, when she kept popping that infuriating question into his ear; he couldn’t have kept it in much longer.

  And she shouldn’t have mentioned love. Suddenly he saw how fatal that had been. If she’d kept it carefully out of all their conversations he might never have noticed how singularly absent it was. Of course he didn’t love her! She didn’t love him. No doubt she thought she did, because she had no idea what the word really entailed, and she had certainly decided that he was a creditable partner, and elected to have him, which was as far as her definition went. But this, whatever it was, had nothing to do with love, suddenly he was quite sure of that. He didn’t know yet what it really was, any more than she did, but he knew it had to be something infinitely larger and more convincing than this. Or else they could keep it!

  Suddenly, with a little calculating twin flare of hope and shame, he wondered if Iris would think it wise to make a strategic withdrawal, and ask him to take her home as soon as they came out of the cinema, and whether, if she showed no sign of suggesting such a move, he could tenderly suggest it for her. If he could persuade her that she ought to have an early night, he might have time to get back to the gallery before it closed. If he wanted to! He was still not sure that he did. But if he did!

  When the lights went up, Iris was in a state of limp and hostile calm, but her eyes were dry, and her handkerchief out of sight. He looked at her with an expressionless face, carefully avoiding any intimation of penitence, and asked constrainedly: ‘Shall we go?’

  Outside it was cold but still, and the streets were a murmur of strolling people and a glimmer of lights and shadows, busy, alert and populous. Among the broken fragments of other people’s conversations and the dappling confusion of lights, it was easy to move islanded and anonymous, more alone than in solitude. They recovered themselves a little, and began to wonder if anything had really happened at all.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ asked Dennis, still avoiding apology. ‘We could call in at Wards’, if you like?’

  He knew he had made a mistake by the way she jumped at the offer, and remembered too late that Wards’ Café had deep alcoves in which a quarrel could take place, even to more tears, without attracting attention. Once she got him in there, who was to say when he would get out again? It was almost a quarter to nine by the church clock. However, there was nothing to be done but follow her in, and hide with her, unwillingly, in a dim corner, where they sat glumly over coffee and biscuits until the waitress was out of earshot.

  ‘I don’t believe you’re a bit sorry,’ said Iris then, opening the attack directly, her blue eyes, slightly reddened with weeping, reproaching him miserably over the steam of the coffee-cups.

  ‘I’m sorry you felt so badly about it as all that,’ said Dennis, hedging a little for the sake of peace. ‘Sorry I said it, for that matter, but I couldn’t help feeling it. Of all the times to start that stuff—’

  ‘You didn’t dare answer me honestly,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody can keep repeating it every five minutes, and
not get sick of it, anyhow. Look, it’s no use talking about it now, when you’re upset already. Drink your coffee, and let me take you home.’

  ‘So’s you can go and enjoy yourself somewhere else, without me! I’m just in your way now, you’d rather get rid of me,’ she accused, between anger and fresh tears. ‘You don’t love me at all!’

  ‘I don’t think either of us has got much right to talk a lot about love,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s a big word. We’d do well to use it pretty sparingly until we know what we have got. You’re a nice girl, I like you a lot – if I didn’t, I shouldn’t be here. Can’t you wait for the rest?’

  ‘It sounds very nice,’ she said bitterly, ‘but I know there is more to it than that. You’re not like you used to be. You’ve changed a lot. I believe it’s got something to do with those Freelands,’ she said, firing shots at random. ‘I’m sure there’s something you never told me about that business.’

  ‘There never was anything to tell. He was drunk, and I drove him home, and I couldn’t get away for over an hour. I hated it, and I’d be only too glad to forget about it, if you’d let me.’

  ‘Then why is it you haven’t been the same since?’

  ‘I didn’t know I hadn’t. What on earth do you suppose I want with people like that, anyhow? They’re not my kind.’

  ‘I know they’re not – better keep reminding yourself of that. They’re not your kind, and they won’t bring you any good!’

  ‘Who’s talking about them? What have they got to do with it? Look, we’d better call it off for tonight. I tell you, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s nothing different about me – I don’t know what you’re fighting about. You’re all excited over absolutely nothing – nothing at all.’

  ‘I don’t call it nothing, when you suddenly say you don’t love me!’ The tears began to ooze, and it was all he could do not to shout at her in a way which would have finished the affair once for all. Instead, he went on talking gently, persuasively, reasonably, because it was after nine o’clock, and there was less than an hour left, and unless he reassured her she would devour it to the last minute.