‘Hullo, Judith!’
‘Hullo!’
What was her name? Joan something? You could never have exchanged more than a few words with her. She was fair-haired, ordinary, rather shapeless and untidy, like so many others; but her smile was reassuring.
‘Have you come up to stay?’ she said.
‘No. Just for the day … to see one or two people. How are you getting on?’
‘All right. How are you?’
‘Oh, all right.’
‘Well – I must fly. Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye.’
She was alone again.
She went up the shallow spiral staircase, and stood still at the top. There was scarcely a sound: it was the usual afternoon hush. She crept up to the mistress’s door and knocked; but there was no answer: then on to one or two other rooms, where the grave faces of dons would look quietly pleased to see her; but no reply came. Everyone must be out in the well-remembered October weather.
There was still Miss Fisher’s door. She had sent a note to Miss Fisher, her own don, saying she might come, to inquire about a possible job of some sort, to discuss her prospects, and ask for a written testimonial: so behind this door there would be someone who expected her.
But when she drew near she heard the sound of several voices raised as if in argument, and another shiver of panic took her. She let her raised hand drop to her side again and went quickly away; and the voices of a great crowd of unknown people seemed to come after her, questioning her intrusion, while she ran up the next flight of stairs.
Here was the familiar corridor and her own door, half-open, with a strange name on it. There was nobody inside. She peeped in. Nothing, nothing of her that remained. Instead of blue, purple and rose colour, black and orange stripes everywhere; an array of unprepossessing photographs on the mantelpiece, and some dirty pink plates and cups strewn about.
Only the window remained unchanged, holding up its great autumnal tree-tops to her gaze; but their unmoving pageant stared back and did not greet her. She was dispossessed entirely.
There on the corner was Jennifer’s door fast-closed, and bearing an unknown name. The sunshine sloped across to it in a dusty beam.
A maid came round the corner carrying a tray of crockery. She stopped, blushing with delight. It was Rose, who had always been so pretty and coy and smiling, and who had once brought a hot limp bunch of wallflowers from her mother’s garden, and laid them on her table. She was quite well thank you, and pleased to see you again. She and some of the other girls were only saying the other day they quite missed you. She wasn’t staying much longer now: she was leaving to get married.
Even Rose would soon be gone.
Now she must get out again as quickly as possible without being seen. She had meant to pause again and listen at Miss Fisher’s door; but now that was impossible. When now and then on her way down a footstep started, coming closer, a voice was raised, her heart beat in a wild terror of detection. Nobody must see her slinking out again from the place where, in her presumptuous folly, she had returned, unannounced, expecting welcome. The place was terrible – a Dark Tower. She must escape. How had she been deluded for three years into imagining it friendly and secure – a permanent dwelling? In four months it had cast her off for ever.
Out again into the courtyard and quickly into the waiting taxi. Jennifer would appreciate the grimness of the story when she told her. She sat back weaving it into a dramatic recital for Jennifer’s sympathetic ears.
The town lay shining and smiling secretly in the sunlight, windless, its buildings, spires and streets caressed with a dusty golden light. Here, too, all was quiet. They were playing games. Where had been so many familiar faces, all seemed strange; and the few undergraduates she passed looked commonplace, dingy even, and schoolboyish.
She hesitated on the threshold of a bookshop and then passed on. To be recognized was now as great a dread as not to be recognized. What would people think of her, wandering about alone? How should she explain her presence to inquirers?
Trinity Great Court grieved in the sun for Martin. It had not yet quite forgotten him. It did not like its handsome young men to die.
If only Jennifer would come soon she could clasp her hand and feel a voluptuous stir at the heart of her perturbations; but to flit and pause alone like this, obliterating herself with a sort of shame, looking out for a chance familiar face and yet fearing to see one – this was appalling. It happened to people visiting their university with twenty years between them and youth.
Tony must still be in Cambridge. He was a Fellow of his College now … Suddenly conscious of his being very near, somewhere round the next corner perhaps, she dived for shelter into the teashop.
The young waitress came towards her with a smile; at sight of the pleasure and greeting in her face, Judith felt a weight lift.
‘Your usual table?’ she said in her soft voice.
‘Yes. I’m expecting my friend. You remember her.’
‘Yes indeed I do. That’s nice.’
She led the way to the table in the corner, beneath the window, lingered a little chatting, and then was called away.
Nearly four o’clock. Jennifer might be late: she always was.
The room was empty save for two women in the opposite corner, engrossed in the usual whispered teashop confidences. What warmth and colour Jennifer would bring with her when she came! Judith thought:
‘I won’t look towards the door; I’ll look out of the window; and then suddenly I’ll turn round and she’ll be there.’
Where she sat, the purple curtain obscured her conveniently from the street; if she craned her neck forward a little she could just see round the curtain and out of the window. Over the large shop-front directly opposite, on the other side of the narrow street, the blue blind was drawn down; and the plated glees made a dark mirror. Within its space she watched a shadow-show of people peering to and fro.
The clocks chimed the hour.
The street was filling up now. It was amusing to keep one’s eyes fixed on the blue blind, to see only en insubstantial noiseless world of human forms, cars end motor-bicycles, and be blind to the confusion of human and mechanical reality collecting outside. She would look only at the blue blind and see Jennifer’s reflection approaching before she saw her self. Her heart beat at the thought.
The room was filling up now. She tipped Jennifer’s chair against the table, for fear it should be taken; resumed her watching.
The space of glass cleared suddenly, was empty of all its shapes. She stared into the dim blank, waiting.
Then two shadows slid slowly in and paused. She watched them calmly, knew them without shock of alarm, or surprise. Roddy bent his head to light his pipe. She knew the individual set of his feet, his long legs, the slender rather round-shouldered line of his back. She could almost discern his curious blunt profile, with its upward sweep of brow end eye. Tony was with him. His short figure had its hands in its pockets, its head raised towards Roddy, nodding slightly as if in earnest conversation. The noise in the street seemed to die away, and in the long hushed breathless space of a minute, Roddy lit his pipe, threw away the match, passed a hand over his hair in a familiar gesture, nodded and laughed, it seemed, looking down at Tony with that queer half-turn of the head; and then moved on, slipped with his companion towards the edge of the pane; and vanished.
He had come to see Tony then, just as if nothing had happened: as if he had not searched the sea for dead Martin; as if there were no reason not to go smoking, laughing, talking past the great court of Trinity.
Did he miss Martin? Had he put from him the memory of the tragedy with a characteristic shrug of the shoulders? Did he ever think with momentary discomfort of Judith?
Tony would have him all to himself now: no Martin, no Judith to interfere. He would be happy. They would come closer to each other; and
never again would Judith be able to step in between them; for there was no more Judith. What were they talking of so earnestly – what, what? The old yearning to know, to understand, returned for a moment, and was followed by an utter blankness; and she knew that she had never known Roddy. He had never been for her. He had not once, for a single hour, become a part of real life. He had been a recurring dream, a figure seen always with abnormal clarity and complete distortion. The dream had obsessed her whole life with the problem of its significance, but now she was rid of it.
She had tried to make a reality out of the unreality: she had had the power to drag him once, reluctantly, from his path to meet her, to force a convergence where none should ever have been; and then disaster had resulted.
She seemed to wake up suddenly. Roddy, Roddy himself had been passing in the street outside. She could have seen him, and, instead, her eyes had not wavered from his reflection. A shadow laid on a screen and then wiped off again: he had never been much more; it was fittingly symbolic that she should have allowed him to pass thus for the last time from her eyes. For it was certain that she would never see him again.
Half-past four. She would not watch the window for Jennifer any more. For the first time it occurred to her that Jennifer might not come. She beckoned to the waitress and ordered China tea and scone.
‘I won’t wait any longer for my friend. Something must have delayed her.’
She sat on, crumbling the scone, sipping tea. She counted twenty three times over very slowly; and then looked at the door. Then she counted again. She took an illustrated paper from the window-sill and studied it. If she went straight through its pages without looking up, Jennifer would come.
Quarter to five. Jennifer might have made a mistake about the tea-shop: perhaps she was sitting waiting somewhere else. But that was impossible. Perhaps she had confused the time, the date …
She took Jennifer’s letter from her bag. October 34th. Four o’clock. ‘Don’t wait for me after five.’
What was it that she had scratched out? She scrutinized the thick erasure; but there was no clue.
The clocks struck five. When the last one had finished chiming she rose, paid her bill and went out again into the happy-looking streets, where there was nothing more now to fear or to desire.
The train steamed out of the station.
Farewell to Cambridge, to whom she was less than nothing. She had been deluded into imagining that it bore her some affection. Under its politeness, it had disliked and distrusted her and all other females; and now it ignored her. It took its mists about it, folding within them Roddy and Tony and all the other young men; and let her go.
Darkness fell, and the ploughed fields went wheeling and slipping by, the smoke-white evening vapours laid low and heavy over their dim chill violet expanses.
She was going home again to be alone. She smiled, thinking suddenly that she might be considered an object for pity, so complete was her loneliness.
One by one they had all gone from her: Jennifer the last to go. Perhaps Jennifer had never for an instant meant to come back; or perhaps her courage had failed her at the last moment. Wise Jennifer shed her past as she went along; she refused to let it draw her back to face its old coils and perplexities and be tangled in them once again. She did not want to return to Judith and love her and be troubled by her once more; or else return to find that all was different, that in this ten months’ interval life had separated them beyond hope of reunion. Yes, Jennifer had escaped again. She had never intended to come back.
Yet it was impossible to feel self-pity. Perhaps it was the train’s monotonous reiterated motion and murmur that benumbed the mind, soothing it to a state that seemed like happiness. When she reached home she would find that the cherry tree in the garden had been cut down. This morning she had seen the gardener start to lay the axe to its dying trunk. Even the cherry tree would be gone. Next door the board would be up: For Sale. None of the children next door had been for her. Yet she, from outside, had broken in among them and taken them one by one for herself. She had been stronger than their combined force, after all.
She was rid at last of the weakness, the futile obsession of dependence on other people. She had nobody now except herself, and that was best.
This was to be happy – this emptiness, this light uncoloured state, this no-thought and no-feeling.
She was a person whose whole past made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded.
Soon she must begin to think: What next?
But not quite yet.
About the Author
Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990) was born on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral, in Buckinghamshire, England, the second of four children. In 1927, a few years after graduating from the University of Cambridge, she published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to critical acclaim and instantaneous celebrity. Lehmann continued to write and publish between 1930 and 1976, penning works including The Weather in the Streets, The Ballad and the Source, and the short memoir The Swan in the Evening. Lehmann was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and remains one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1927 by the Estate of Rosamond Lehmann
Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox
978-1-4976-9515-3
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Dusty Answer Page 34