“No, I wouldn’t,” said Louisa. “I’d come to you like a shot—and have bamboo frames.”
“There you are: they’ve been in the window a month, and you’re the first person to notice them. You’ve liked this place too; the Ibsens—for all they read Dylan Thomas!” said Jimmy wryly—“think it’s a bit lunatic. You come along and back my judgment. Could you live in it yourself, Louisa?”
“Easily,” breathed Louisa.
He hesitated.
“You’re not just being kind? You mustn’t be too kind,” said Jimmy anxiously. “You wouldn’t let me make a fool of myself?”
Louisa paused, but only for a moment.—It was still no trap she sprung! On the contrary, from sheer impulsive generosity she threw away a woman’s most precious privilege: that of making the man declare himself first.
“If you asked me, perhaps I would live here …” breathed Louisa.
4
They were words to raise him, in one instant, from the depths of faithful yearning to the topmost peak of fulfillment. Louisa’s heart beat faster still, as she watched the changing emotions reflected in his face. Incredulity was, naturally, the first; after which came sudden illumination, followed by—plain terror.
Just as F. Pennon had done, the love of a lifetime at last zooming into his lap, Jimmy Brown looked, plainly, terrified.
And just as swiftly as in Gladstone Mansions, Louisa understood. How settled and well-organized the life of each, of F. Pennon the tycoon and Jimmy Brown the Broydon optician! For each certain sentimental memories (of a profile, of long legs and red hair) had sweetened the daily round; before the embodiment of which each, equally, flinched. It was no use F. Pennon’s flinching, Enid Anstruther knew her feminine business too well; indeed her last remembered look urged Louisa not to be a damned fool. But Louisa, unlike Mrs. Anstruther, was fond of men.
She understood everything. In a flash, casting her mind back over the past week, she realized that it hadn’t been even a last beautiful memory Jimmy wanted. What he wanted was an outside opinion—just like Miss Wilbraham with her silhouettes, and Mr. Wright with his collection of bomb fragments. Jimmy Brown had something more interesting to offer—his struggle towards sophistication; but the principle was the same. He didn’t want Louisa to marry him, he just wanted her to give him full marks.
“… if I hadn’t to go back tomorrow!” finished Louisa.
So fast can thought travel (even while the expression changes on a face), the interval was scarcely noticeable. Jimmy’s processes were a little slower, the peril he’d glimpsed had been unnerving; another moment passed before he could breathe quite freely; but what a happy breath he drew at last!
“That’s the nicest thing you could possibly have said, Louisa. You really like everything?”
Now all she had to do was give him his marks.
“I honestly think,” pronounced Louisa, “you’ve made something quite special here. (Why not have another brandy?” she suggested kindly.) “I mean, I’ve seen all sorts of bachelor quarters—not only in London, in places like Cannes as well—but this is really something special. Like the shop,” added Louisa. (Here she had to pause and think; she could hardly make him believe she had a wide experience of opticians’. Fortunately the echo of an earlier remark helped her out.) “Those bamboo frames!” exclaimed Louisa. “I only wish I’d had them, at Cannes! D’you know you’ve grown very sophisticated, Jimmy?”
He glowed.
“It’s made me a bit of a rare bird, in Broydon.”
“That you must put up with,” said Louisa firmly. “D’you know what you should do next? Make the Ibsens read Aristophanes in modern dress.—I mean in modern English,” amended Louisa. (Naturally they’d be in modern dress; she was getting a little tired.) She paused; really she couldn’t think of anything else. “And now as I have to go back tomorrow, it’s time I went and packed,” said Louisa, rising. “And so as this is good-by, Jimmy, you can give me a kiss.”
It was their first, it was their last. Jimmy Brown put everything he knew into it; but what Louisa chiefly recognized was gratitude.
5
Awaiting her at Broydon Court she unexpectedly found a telegram. Louisa was almost too tired, and too downhearted, to open it; but an orange envelope demands to be slit.
ARRIVED SAFELY ALL WELL ALL THANK YOU STOP CONSIDER YOURSELF GOOD ANGEL ENID PERFECTLY COOPERATIVE LOVE FROM ALL AT BOURNEMOUTH FREDDY.
Louisa screwed it up and tossed it into the paper-basket.
She unloaded her camera. In the preoccupations of the day, she had omitted to do this earlier; now she discovered another omission. She had forgotten to put any film in. Accustomed to making play, under the eye of Mrs. Brent, with blank shot, then preoccupied with thoughts of Jimmy Brown, Louisa had labored all morning with her camera empty. Ivor and Ivan might indeed have leaped to the firmament—but unrecorded.
Part Three
Chapter Sixteen
1
“So you’ve bin away again,” said the milkman. “What was it like this time?”
“Disappointing,” said Louisa; and shut the door.
She turned on a tap, filled the kettle, lit the gas, laid the table and reached down the coffee tin, all without moving her feet. Never before had she felt cramped, in her kitchenette-dinette; but after the gay, light spaciousness of Freddy’s villa, after the gloomy but spacious dining room at Broydon Court, she felt cramped.
In the distraction, a week before, of peddling Number Ten’s beechnuts, she’d evidently forgotten to empty the sink basket. It smelt. She looked about for a paper bag. After a week—two weeks—without shopping, there wasn’t one. Louisa found an old newspaper instead. Tea leaves and a stalk of spring onion leaked from the untidy parcel; it would still have to do, until she dressed and went down to the dustbins.
The kettle boiling, she made coffee and sat down. The striped oilcloth covering the table was still fairly clean, there was still an adequate supply of paper napkins advertising cider. No china had been broken in her absence—no one, during her absence, had come in to clean. Which was probably why the whole divan-bedroom-bathroom-et-cetera set-up looked so tatty …
She might have been a good angel to old Freddy, and a good angel to the Admiral, but if what she now sat down to was a good angel’s normal breakfast, Louisa felt she’d been gypped.
In any case, she hadn’t wanted a halo, what she’d wanted was a wedding ring.—The image of Admiral Colley sporting at Bournemouth was irritating enough, but before the image of Enid Anstruther in very pale blue Louisa could have wept with disappointment. For hadn’t everything started so hopefully? Hadn’t Jimmy been truly rejoiced to see her?—“And wasn’t I made a fool of?” thought Louisa bitterly.
It was noticeable that she gave scarcely a thought to her disappointment over Ivor and Ivan. Rewarding though that final shot should have been, Louisa merely reflected that at least she had enough straights to keep Mrs. Brent from suing her. She wasn’t interested in dogs any more, she was interested in husbands …
“Some women get three or four,” thought Louisa enviously. “They must go in runs …”
She had in fact hit on a profound truth, and might have elaborated it: runs of the same suit.—It has often been observed, for example, that if a woman begins by marrying a millionaire, millionaires are what she will continue to marry, they have a great sense of solidarity, they won’t let poor Nelly starve. Less fortunate women fall upon runs of invalids, or ne’er-do-wells, or plain crooks. Louisa, less fortunate still, seemed to have begun with Jimmy Brown upon a run of non-starters.
2
To make the next few days peculiarly trying, all the emotions she’d felt on returning husbandless from Bournemouth, now that she returned husbandless from Broydon, were doubled. It was absurd, and with one part of her brain Louisa recognized it, that she couldn’t bear to encounter Rossy or Hugo Pym without either a square-cut emerald (F. Pennon) or a neat half-hoop (Jimmy Brown) on the appropriate finger; but so it
was. Once again Louisa avoided her usual haunts; almost surreptitiously developed and printed the straights of Ivor and Ivan (and didn’t dare send an order form with them); and when Hugo telephoned, hung up without answering.
Number Ten resumed his pleasant custom of a rhythmic aubade; Louisa didn’t answer Number Ten either.
It was a strange, do-nothing, will-less period altogether, quite unlike any other in Louisa’s life. By great good fortune, a firm of greeting-card publishers sent her a check for ten guineas: Louisa, reading the caption on the docket—“Bow-wows to Baby!”—didn’t so much as check her files to see whether the bow-wow had been a poodle or a chow-chow. She should have been encouraged, she should immediately have set about borrowing a Kerseymere dachshund to pose for Greetings to Grandma; instead, she just cashed the check. She’d lost interest, in dogs.
She was just waiting for a run to break.
3
“You’re losin’ weight again,” observed the milkman.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Louisa.
“Broodin’ too much on Ibsen, p’raps?” suggested the milkman.
“Actually it’s a name I never want to hear again,” said Louisa.
He looked at her thoughtfully.—All milkmen know a great deal more about their customers than they let on: admire a bright young housewife’s new washing machine while well aware that the new telly isn’t paid for either, unblinkingly continue to deliver yoghurt for husbands missing but hoped back soon. It is a profession that calls for any amount of tact.
“Be that as it may,” said the milkman, “you know what I b’lieve Ibsen’d do in your place?”
“No,” said Louisa.
“He’d baby-sit.”
“Sometimes I can’t make up my mind,” said Louisa, “whether you’re trying to be funny or genuinely cracked.”
“You do both me and His Whiskers an injustice,” said the milkman. “What’s wrong with three and six an hour, for nothing but watching the telly and eating supper?”
Louisa hesitated. She hadn’t entirely gone to pieces, under disappointment. Her general indifference didn’t extend to food, especially if free.
“You mean supper’s thrown in?”
“Certainly it is,” said the milkman. “Likewise char later on. Besides bringing tears of gratitude to the eyes of some pore distressed young wife and mother wishing to go out on the tiles.”
“It’s a sad picture all right,” agreed Louisa.
“Such as Mrs. P., fr’instance,” continued the milkman thoughtfully. “‘Oh, milkman,’ she cries (not half an hour ago; String Street) ‘don’t you know of anyone to help us out this evening?’ She’s that sort, see; won’t have anyone not personally recommended. (And rightly, considering it’s twins age four just like little angels.) ‘No name occurs at the moment,’ I told her, ‘but if one should, in the course of the day, I’ll get ’em to give you a tinkle.’ ‘Oh do!’ cries she—”
“Look,” said Louisa, “I know you’re enjoying this, but you needn’t go on. Just tell me the number.”
Both money and meal would be welcome; the necessary concomitant of solitude was positively attractive. To sit alone and brood, though not on Ibsen, exactly suited Louisa’s current mood.
4
Unusually, however, as she rang the Peels’ bell, Louisa was slightly nervous. She had no experience of baby-sitting.—She had no experience of children at all; moreover, during the course of the day, try as she would to keep her mind on infancy’s sweeter aspects—“Where did you come from, baby dear?”—she kept remembering far different lines from the Lays of Ancient Rome—“No child but screamed out curses/And shook its little fist.”
Nothing could have been more reassuring, however, than her immediate reception. Louisa’s first glance was naturally for the supper tray: there appeared to be at least a pound of ham on it, besides trimmings—and the young Peels themselves welcomed her with happy enthusiasm. They were in evening dress, they had already the aura of celebration about them; she dark and pretty, he ugly and engaging, the young Peels almost took Louisa into their arms, so glad they were to see her.
“Miss Datchett? How good and kind of you!” cried Mrs. Peel.
“God bless our milkman,” agreed her husband warmly.
“Because if we couldn’t have found anyone in time—! There’s your supper, there’s the television,” exclaimed Mrs. Peel rapidly, “and lots of books if you’d rather read, and of course the children are in bed but we’ll go and wake them up.”
To Louisa this seemed a rash proposal indeed; why not let sleeping dogs lie? But Mrs. Peel—in a rustle of silk skirts, on a patter of silver slippers—had run her into the nursery before she could protest, and then Louisa saw the point. Switching on more candle-power than the night lights afforded—
“Darlings,” cried Mrs. Peel briskly, “this is the lady who’s come to keep house, just like the other ladies do, while Daddy and I go out. Take a good look at her, so that if you wake up and she comes in you won’t be surprised.”
Two infants, each in its cot, sat up and stared gravely.
“Hi,” said Louisa—not quite sure of the right address. It seemed acceptable enough, however; at least neither screamed out curses, nor shook its little fist.
“She’s got red hair,” pointed out their mother. “(You don’t mind, Miss Datchett? It gives them a clue.) You’ll see her nice red hair, and remember she’s the lady here to take care of you.”
The children stared again, and accepted the situation with phlegm. Mrs. Peel embraced each in turn, popped each in turn under its covers with the offhand, expert gesture of a gardener bedding a bulb, switched off the lights again, and that was that. Evidently the Peels were a thoroughly well-adjusted family.
“I’ll leave the door ajar,” said Mrs. Peel, as she raced Louisa back to the sitting room, “and if you do hear anything, you might just look in. And if you should by any chance need to get in touch with us—”
“If the house catches fire!” said her husband affectionately.
“—you can phone us at the Savoy. We’ll be in the River Room.”
“Suppose anyone phones here?” asked Louisa.
“No one will,” said Mrs. Peel confidently. “Everyone knows we’re always out, on our anniversary!”
So that was it, thought Louisa: the reason for the evening dress and the River Room at the Savoy, and the general air of happy celebration. It was the Peels’ wedding anniversary.
5
No circumstance could have afforded better food for brooding, but first things first; Louisa sat down to the supper tray. She was uncommonly hungry; she left a last slice of ham (disposed to cover as much of the dish as possible) purely for manners. Of the salad she left half a tomato, and of the long French loaf about four inches.
It must be admitted that the beauty and poetry of family life, by which Louisa was so soon and so forcibly to be struck, would have lost half its impact on an empty stomach. So square a meal left her unusually receptive to wholesome influences.
As she tiptoed through the nursery door (no stirring within had summoned her, Louisa was just being conscientious), the night-light-illumined room swam poetically before her gaze. The two small beds made blurs of whiteness like water lilies on a lake—within each its precious, golden-headed heart. There was the loving humor of poetry there too: a frieze of small stuffed animals, zebra and bear and panda, ranged in loving, humorous, nursery-rhyme order on the window seat …
Where Mrs. Peel no doubt sat to read fairy tales.
“Perhaps that’s what does it,” thought Louisa vaguely—envisaging Mrs. Peel, after at least five years of matrimony, silver-slippered and satin-skirted to celebrate an anniversary. “Not just having a husband, having a family as well …”
Thoughtfully she returned to the sitting room, and for the first time noted a dozen or more photographs, several silver-framed, displayed on desk and mantelshelf. She hadn’t noticed them before because none were of dogs: t
hey showed mostly the Peel infants from nappy stage onwards. But beside holiday snaps of their parents—and, yes, a wedding group!—stood as well, in the silver frames, photographs obviously of grandparents. “Something’s been happening,” thought Louisa. “While I’ve been nannying Hugo, and all the rest of that Bohemian bunch, something’s been going on …”
Could it be that family life had made a comeback?
Could it be that what she really needed was a family man?
When she considered Mrs. Peel again, Louisa was sure of it.
“Only I’ll have to find one soon,” reflected Louisa uneasily. “As it is I’ll be about fifty, before we’ve teen-agers …”
She pulled herself up. Temporarily at least she was a family’s custodian, it was no time for dreams but a time to be alert and competent—apt to rout burglars, put out fires, or, alternatively, dash through smoke with an infant under each arm. Louisa in her new enthusiasm felt capable of any one of these acts—if possible would have made a shot at all three simultaneously. In fact, having nothing more to do than sit in a comfortable chair and watch television, Louisa felt slightly wasted. But she consoled herself with the knowledge that at least she brought peace of mind to affectionate parents out on the tiles.
—On second thoughts, she switched the sound off: in case she heard—or rather didn’t hear—a noise. The resulting dumb-show was so eerie, she switched that off too; and on the blank screen instantly visualized a cigarette-end smoldering in a paper-basket, a man with his hat pulled over his eyes peering in at a window …
“Nonsense,” Louisa adjured herself practically. “Isn’t this the fourth floor?”
Also she hadn’t been smoking. Nor had the Peels.
If it was probably mere prudence to turn off the television, there was no reason why she shouldn’t read. Louisa selected from the crowded shelves what looked like a promising detective story, and put her feet up. It opened, the detective story, promisingly again, with an unexpected ring at a door.—The author would have been really gratified to see Louisa jump, as at that moment the flat doorbell rang too.
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