I walked on until the tide began to come in, and then I turned towards what was to become the town. I ate a lunch of fish and chips in a café crowded with school-children being treated by their parents. Children again: I began to feel better. Undoubtedly my destiny was to be coloured by children, and I felt a distaste and an impatience for those elderly revellers waiting for me back at the hotel. I wandered about the town in the afternoon, bought a pair of gloves for Dolly, for whom I now felt my usual mixture of pity and exasperation, drank a cup of tea in another café, and then, when I could no longer avoid it, made my way back, through streets now crowded with last-minute shoppers, to the glistening lights of the monstrous and menacingly hospitable hotel.
The only evening wear I possessed consisted of a black top and a black and white check taffeta skirt. This had always seemed adequate for the few parties I had attended at home, but here, I realised, as I joined the others for the champagne reception, I was out of my depth. All the ladies were tremendously coiffed, having evidently spent the afternoon in the hairdressing salon, and they were dressed as if for a gala evening at Covent Garden. Perfumes mingled and clashed; ear-rings were constantly adjusted. The mild husbands circulated goodnaturedly in ancient dinner jackets which revealed their owners’ ages. Dolly and Harry stood out clearly as the most handsome couple, for both had that air of busyness and appetite which their contemporaries could only envy. Everything about Harry gleamed: his shirt, his silver hair, his narrow shoes on his small dancer’s feet. Dolly wore black, but there was nothing modest about Dolly’s black: it was a shameless satin sheath moulded to her opulent figure, the tulip skirt parting from time to time to reveal her still excellent legs. She looked resolute, outrageous, and magnificent, like a star giving what might turn out to be her final performance. So filled was she with her defiant belief in herself that all eyes were upon her. And I did not begrudge her her triumph, for however much I had contributed (unwittingly, a hidden voice reminded me, but I silenced it) I had to concede that I had given her pleasure. And Dolly’s desire for pleasure was so profound that it seemed only natural to provide it. When in a state of pleasure—and there was no denying this—the years fell away from Dolly, making her real age and its disadvantages irrelevant. It was almost possible to wish her well in whatever she undertook. I learned something in those few moments; mainly I learned that not everyone felt as I did. I saw and applauded the energy of a temperament in every way opposed to mine; I saw—and even understood—the thrill of the chase. That Harry was the prey seemed to me unimportant. That I was there under false pretences seemed equally unimportant. Momentarily I was Dolly’s faithful ally, with, at the back of my mind, the memory of her bitter European face, as revealed in sleep, in the half light of the car, the effervescent mask for once cast aside and the grim working woman revealed. I was both frightened and determined for her, as she must have been frightened and determined for herself.
My indulgence cooled slightly in the course of the evening, when it became obvious that Dolly had forgotten all about me, and that Harry regarded my presence as a joke. This became even more apparent when the loudspeaker, after a preliminary crackle, announced that dancing was about to begin. Although rendered almost comatose by dinner in the Italian style I followed Dolly and Harry into the ballroom, where I caught the eye of an otherwise impassive teenage saxophonist who immediately looked away. The music was predictable and slightly out of date: selections from the Beatles’ early albums, selections from Fiddler on the Roof, selections from Brigadoon, and once every hour, with a wail from the saxophone, ‘Moon River’. Dolly and Harry sped across the floor, weightless and at one, still businesslike, but expert, as if they had been doing this all their lives. It occurred to me, as I waited silently for the evening to end, that this was what they did in their spare time. There must have been afternoon tea dances in various London hotels, or maybe they had joined a club of some sort. A club was where a predatory man or woman would look for a partner, and Harry and Dolly were both predators. I shifted uneasily as Dolly’s tulip skirt swung open and her triumphant laughter rang out. I doubted whether on that previous occasion, in this hotel or one like it, when she had subjugated my uncle, she had been more sexually aroused than she so obviously was now. Others became aware of what was in any case obvious: applause which had been enthusiastic became desultory, faces relapsed into disapproval. At last Dolly noticed this, and led Harry off the floor to where I was seated. ‘Give Jane a dance, Harry,’ she said.
‘I’d rather not,’ I protested.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jane. Off you go.’
Harry’s fingertips moved intimately to my upper arm. Longingly I gazed back at Dolly who glared at me. As the band struck up ‘Moon River’ for the third time I heard the last instructions I was ever to accept from Dolly. Harry smoothed his hair: I gave Dolly one final glance. ‘Charm!’ she hissed, and then I was on the dance floor, far from human aid.
Harry was a good dancer; he was even too good. He was certainly too good for me. His tiny feet sped over the floor while mine trod hesitantly after them, occasionally a step behind. Humming jauntily he issued instructions which, coming from him, sounded dubious. ‘Let it go,’ he ordered. ‘Easy now,’ and again, ‘Let it go.’ I had lost weight and my skirt was slightly loose. I was aware of his hand, which he turned fastidiously outwards, shifting the waistband. When my ordeal was over I was obliged to adjust it, in full view of Dolly and her friends. ‘Harry up to his tricks again,’ tittered Phyllis, but Dolly, I could see, was put out. When I said that I was going to bed, she said, quite shortly, ‘Yes, do.’ Evidently my increasingly agonised presence was no longer to her liking, if it ever had been. I was only a pretext, I reflected, and none of it was important. But I woke in the night to hear delighted laughter in the next room—Dolly’s room—interspersed with Harry’s slow chuckle. Looking back now I realise that what was taking place may have been merely anodyne; then it sounded like an introduction to the world’s corruption. I put the pillow over my head and somehow struggled through until morning.
I was up far too early. I went down into the stale-smelling restaurant, where there was no one about. There was a sound of hoovering from the lounge. I date my horror of hotels from that morning. When a waiter finally appeared I coldly requested coffee and toast. ‘Full English breakfast at nine, Madam,’ I was told. Even more coldly I repeated my request. At nine o’clock Dolly appeared, alone, in a rather unfortunate trouser suit which was ill-suited to her odalisque’s figure.
‘A word with you, if you don’t mind, Dolly,’ I said.
‘Well?’ She was no better disposed than I was.
‘I’m going home. There’s no point in my staying. You’ve got your friends, and I’ve got mine.’
‘Oh, really? And who are your friends? Miss Lawlor? Pickering? Your mother?’
‘I thought you were fond of my mother.’
‘I loved her! But she wasn’t a real woman to my mind. She just sat and read. Real women are alive, Jane!’ Here I anticipated her views on the desirability of singing and dancing, but she was too angry for that. ‘Real women attract men, Jane! It’s no good your looking at me like that. It’s true. How do you think life goes on?’
‘I didn’t expect to see your friend here …’
‘Why not? He is my friend, after all. I’m not going to apologise because he wants to be with me, because we want to be together. You’ll find out one day, although at the moment I wouldn’t bank on it.’
‘I’m going home today.’
‘Yes, go! Go back to your books! Go back to Pickering! You’re no good to me here.’
‘But I wasn’t ever going to be, was I? You planned to be with your friends all along. I was just here as an afterthought.’ To pay the bill, I knew, but that seemed too outrageous a thing to say, even now.
‘My dear, you were never of the slightest importance to Harry and me, or the girls. I thought to do you a good turn, show you a bit of life, take you out of yourself. Ins
tead of which you sulk!’
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m rather tired. I didn’t get much sleep last night.’
There was the tiniest pause.
‘Then perhaps you know a bit more about life today than you did yesterday.’
‘Perhaps I do.’
There was a silence.
‘Go home, Jane. You’re no good to me here. In fact if anything could spoil the pleasure it would be you.’
‘Unfortunately there are no trains until tomorrow.’
‘And you’re too mean to hire a car! Just like your mother, with her little skirts from Jaeger! Oh, go home! I don’t care how you get there. Bon débarras! Of course, you know what’s really wrong, don’t you? You’re jealous! Harry was saying to me last night, what that girl needs is a man.’
I doubted whether Harry had put it as delicately as that. We were both so terribly angry that I thought we must never see each other again. There remained the matter of the bill, a matter which had also occurred to Dolly.
‘Pay your bill and go,’ she said. ‘Harry and I will look after ourselves.’ And with that she turned on her heel and went upstairs, having effectively had the last word.
I checked out, in the horrible hotel parlance. ‘Checking out already, Madam?’ the clerk enquired, relieved to see at least one of us leave. He ordered a car for me—at least hotels were used to this service, and at the moment it was the only service I required—and we slid silently away into a deserted town, where everyone was at home and would be worn out by lunchtime. At the hotel the carol singers would soon be arriving, to be served up with the mid-morning coffee. And no doubt my shortcomings would be discussed by Dolly and her friends, all of whom would be delighted to have a new and scandalous topic of conversation. The husbands might feel a little sorry for me, but would prudently say nothing. Harry would repeat his opinion as to my real requirements, but here they would laughingly shriek in protest and the atmosphere would be restored to something like normality. I had, if anything, done them all a favour.
My thoughts were so discordant that I hardly noticed the countryside, through which we intermittently passed. Eventually my sadness became qualified by a certain resignation. Dolly’s almost unbelievable crassness I put down to age, and perhaps something else. What was it? Desperation? A sense of time running out? For although things had gone according to plan—her plan—there was a bitterness about her which surfaced from time to time, in the grimly closed mouth perceived on the journey down, and the force of her anger, which was no longer her more easily recognisable impatience. There was a coarsening there, as if all her instincts had deteriorated. She had not always been so blatant, so complacent in her demands: indeed my father had frequently shaken his head in admiration over her obliquity. Now she had become cynical, like a blackmailer. Yet here perhaps I began to glimpse a deeper reason for her behaviour, for she knew that however silent we remained on the matter, we—my mother, my father, and myself—considered her excessive, and that she was thus destined to remain something of a stranger among us.
For our exclusiveness we were required to pay a penalty. And so uncomfortable were our own feelings in this matter that it never occurred to us to demand something as simple and straightforward as an accounting. If my father had cheerfully sat her down, and said, ‘Now, Dolly, let’s find out exactly how much money you have. Let’s look at your outgoings and see if we can save something.’ Instead of which he had regarded Dolly’s visits as comic interludes, and demanded to be entertained with descriptions of her performance. After all these years nobody knew exactly how much Dolly had to live on, how much rent she paid, what Annie’s wages cost her. She was not in need; that much my mother, and before her my grandmother, had seen to. But they may have felt a fundamental distaste for one who exploited them so conscientiously, more, for one who put exploitation to work for her as others engage in a profession, and this distaste may have been perceived by Dolly, whose judgements were usually kept hidden but whose instincts were far from misinformed. We had held her at arm’s length and she had made us pay for the privilege. And because I was the last in line I had to be the last victim, for I had inherited not only the money but the moral high ground. For this I would not be forgiven.
Nobody loved Dolly: that was her tragedy. Nobody even liked her very much, and she knew that too. She was accepted as a friend by women inferior to herself because she was vigorous and clever, because she entertained and fed them, because she sorted out their affairs, and listened with every appearance of interest to their feeble gossip. Unnerved and enervated by years of this company she had succumbed to the first man to make a show of virility in her presence, and thus, like any victim, had cast herself under his spell. And he had partly compensated her for many humiliations by allowing her to reassert her right to be a normal woman, with a normal woman’s expectations, love, certainly, even marriage. This far-distant goal had been approached more nearly than at any other time in her long widowhood. Her present coarseness spoke of feelings long held in check by what had in fact been an unwanted chastity. She was a woman of her time and of her age, idle but enterprising, passive but demanding; she would have made an excellent wife. Women of my own generation are expected to accumulate love affairs throughout the years until they are Dolly’s age, although this may be as distasteful to some of them as the idea of celibacy is supposed to be: they have ‘rights’, usually described as rights over their body, and they are expected to exercise them. But Dolly was in her sixties; she still thought in terms of marriage, and for this reason she was chaste, as her own mother had been in that previous widowhood, and whose shyness and humility she may have cherished as an ideal, in default of any other.
There remained the business of Harry, and his effect on her, all the more dangerous because of her circumstances. She had been encouraged, or had encouraged herself, to think of permanence, whereas what he offered was the most cursory of interludes—even I could see that. To Harry Dolly must have seemed an original personality, the kind which did not normally come his way, but for her age much too impressionable. The temptation to make love to such a woman, and to reduce her to gratitude and passivity, was very real but essentially cruel. Harry offered a ration of lovemaking, to an extent which would cause him no inconvenience. He was even amused by her ardour, which confirmed him in his own high opinion of himself. He had not once in my presence exchanged a gentle word with her, expressed pleasure, or even offered her a conventional greeting. ‘You got here all right, then?’ he had said, looking up from his newspaper, which was not even cast aside. Harry, in short, was the worst kind of man, the kind who fails to recognise his own cruelty. Coarsely attractive he may have been, physically vigorous he undoubtedly was, but he regarded his willingness to make love to lonely women in as professional a manner as others lay claim to an ability to manipulate bad backs. Harry was the sexual equivalent of an osteopath or a chiropractor: he offered ‘relief’, and gave, as he thought, satisfaction all round.
And in her heart Dolly knew this, just as she knew that he did not love her, that he was the sort of man she would have treated with disdain in former happier times. For Harry did not make Dolly feel safe, and safety was the only condition she now sought. She knew perfectly well that among her friends her status was uncertain, but that all could have been rectified by the presence of a man at her side, or even in the background, provided that his presence was permanent. She may even have reckoned, in her desperation, that if she had a husband, however humdrum, she could afford to be as stupid as Phyllis or Beatrice or Rose, those dear friends by whom she was so profoundly bored. After years of living on her wits she looked on stupidity as a luxury she could not afford, but which she craved, now more than ever, because it held a promise of the peace which had so far been denied her.
So that the coarseness of her own behaviour, towards myself in particular, was in reality the outcome of despair, as if her defences were giving way, her pretences as well, and as if she no longer had the faith in he
rself necessary to carry out her difficult task. I had seen her at a turning point in her affair with Harry. Despite having spent the night with him (and who knows whether it might not have been the last?) she had been discontented on the following morning, the morning of our argument. She may have sensed that the affair had ended, for Harry would certainly not bother to explain himself, and would have expressed astonishment if she had been unwise enough to challenge him. There had been a tired asperity about her; she had already made the mistake of wearing that tight trouser suit, which did not become her. Would she commit further imprudences, plant a man’s cap roguishly on her greying head, like the lady in Colette’s story? I was painfully glad that I would not be present to witness this, if indeed it were to take place. At the same time I felt profoundly unhappy for Dolly. Even the matter of the hotel bill upset me. It was then that I had the idea of making her an allowance out of my own money. It was the old equation: she wanted it, I had it. On this silent Christmas afternoon, when Dolly would be tucking in to whatever food the hotel judged appropriate to the occasion and which would no doubt run the gamut down to the very last mince pie (here I became aware that I was hungry), I made a vow to endow Dolly as she would wish to be endowed. There was no doubt in my mind that if I did not do so I should have bad dreams.
It was already getting dark when I reached home. Throughout the journey the driver and I had not exchanged a single word. My thoughts had been so searching and so uncomfortable that I had not noticed this, nor had I noticed the time passing. The sky already had a lightless look, although one could not expect it to get properly dark for a couple of hours. Prince of Wales Drive lay under a silence so profound that it might have been an enchantment: not a car passed in the street, nor were there many lights in the windows. Maybe everyone had gone away, as I was supposed to have done. The sound of my key in the lock was an anomaly, even an indiscretion. I unpacked my bag, made coffee, which I had to drink without milk, and ate an apple. Then I lay down on my bed, not to sleep, but to reread the last chapter of David Copperfield, to give myself encouragement.
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