After the Party

by Cressida Connolly

  Hugh was very buoyed up. Phyllis did not wish to dampen his spirits by expressing any reluctance, but she did not look forward to leaving their rented house here at Bosham. She loved the situation, the garden which ran down to the harbour wall and the constant variety of the watery view. She loved the little boats with their sails catching the light, and the parties of children with their shrimping nets who hovered over the shallow pools which appeared at low tide. She loved to walk across the bay when the tide was almost out, when the retreating water created for an instant traceries of foam like lace upon the dark sand.

  At least the move wouldn’t happen for some time and they’d be able to see out the summer here. The children would not have to adjust to their new home until the Christmas holidays. A house wasn’t built overnight, as Hugh would tell her over and over again in the ensuing months. Nearly every time he said these words he assumed an expression of some portent, as if a great wisdom was to be delivered, before adding: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ Then he would pause, almost as though he expected to be congratulated. Sometimes her husband struck Phyllis as a rather ridiculous figure. At such times she felt resigned, more than disappointed. He was a decent man, not unkind; it was his seriousness which made him a touch pompous at times, but seriousness was not after all a crime. People often remarked how fine-looking he was and it crossed her mind to wonder whether such expressions of admiration were offered as a sop; whether what they meant was: he may be a bit of an ass, but at least he’s handsome. Perhaps what they were really saying was that he was too good-looking for a woman as ordinary as herself. In any event it was an occasional source of mild curiosity to Phyllis that neither his good looks nor others’ admiration of them actually brought her pleasure. Her husband’s appearance was simply a feature of life, as constant and unremarkable as the curve of a familiar hill. She wondered what people thought her reaction should be when they remarked upon it. Was she expected to be grateful?

  The following day Hugh took Phyllis and the children over to see the site where the house was to be built. It was at present a small field with the neglected look of pasture overgrazed by ponies, like a moth-eaten old billiard table. The place seemed very exposed, without trees or features of any kind. Edwin was disappointed because he had been hoping for a tree-house and Julia, who now spent all her time at the camp-site, made no attempt to disguise her boredom. Frances alone expressed enthusiasm for her father’s plans, walking slowly around the boundary with him, listening to all his ideas. She suggested that a sunken pond would look nice in the corner where the field dipped slightly.

  ‘We could have goldfish and water-lilies and a little fountain,’ she said brightly.

  ‘That’s a thought,’ said Hugh. ‘A flagged path might be rather an idea, with a low box hedge around.’

  ‘I could play hopscotch there if it was flagged,’ said Frances.

  ‘Could we have a seat, looking back towards the house?’ said Phyllis.

  ‘We might find someone to copy the bench at Rose Green, the one that looks over the rose arbour,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s rather a good shape. I’ll ask Patricia.’

  ‘How much longer?’ asked Julia.

  ‘Well, these things take time,’ said Hugh. ‘We haven’t even finalized the design of the house as yet. There’s the question of sculleries and pantries and larders and so on: they all have to be slotted in somewhere, without taking up all the best views.’

  ‘No, I meant how much longer till we go? It’s lunchtime, surely.’

  Phyllis found it difficult to envisage them all living here. This bright air would be constrained within rooms, rooms with parquet floors and doors and door knobs, solid and implacable. Sedate clocks would chime the hours, rugs would muffle their footsteps. All the things that went into a house seemed daunting to amass: banisters and stair-rods and light switches and soap dishes and bath-racks and umbrella stands and pelmets, all weighing down upon this empty patch on which they now stood, replacing the fresh smell of the sea with heavy indoor smells of polish, beeswax and wood. This was Hugh’s vision, to fashion a house and a garden to reflect himself, somewhere of substance. Phyllis felt a stab of envy that the children would not have to be rooted for ever within this constructed idea of his, but would over time be able to flit in when the weather was fair and then away as it suited them. Like swallows, or bats. Growing up would bring freedom to Julia and Frances and Edwin, but in her own life the reverse had been the case. Age and time had brought greater constriction. She could not help but feel less than thrilled about her life in the new house. It was not her dream, after all.

  Phyllis, 1979

  Jamie Dickinson. Not that he’d be part of your research: he had nothing to do with politics or any of that. I don’t remember ever discussing anything worldly with him, not once. He was rather child-like, in that way. But he was important to me, you see. He liked all of us, my sisters and me: to begin with I think he liked us all the same. His parents farmed a dairy herd to the east of our house; they were much older than our parents even though he was the same age as Nina. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters of his own; perhaps the Dickinsons were too old to have more children – it wasn’t the sort of thing one inquired about.

  Three girls next door with ponies and woods with a stream and a tennis court, of course we were a terrific draw for a solitary boy. If anything he and Nina seemed to make a natural pair, both being the practical ones, not like Patricia and myself. I was rather a dreamer, but now I’d say that Patricia was always scheming, that everything she did was calculated, from her teens onwards. For the rest of her life. But of course I would say that, wouldn’t I?

  We hardly ever went to his house. It smelt funny, fatty and a bit sour, because of the milking. His mother churned her own butter in the dairy off the kitchen. It had slate shelves to keep the milk cool and one tiny window, high up in the wall like the window in a cell. It had been made like that so the sunlight could light the room but not shine as low as the shelves, so its heat wouldn’t spoil the cream and butter. There was tight wire mesh across the window to stop flies getting in. Once he took us in there to see a dead mouse floating on the top of a huge wide pudding basin full of cream: it all had to be thrown out, pints and pints of it. I can’t tell you how disgusting the naked tail of a dead mouse looks, in cream: much more revolting than you’d imagine. And on the fur. It took away all the pity of it having drowned.

  Our parents tolerated him coming to our house, but there was an unspoken feeling that it didn’t quite do for us to go to his over-much. They were tenant farmers, which meant they didn’t own their place, you see. I believe Jamie picked it up later, for a song: farmland was cheap, after the war.

  Most days, especially on fine days, Jamie would just materialize. I don’t think we ever made an actual plan. We’d get to the end of our lessons and he’d just be waiting outside, ready. He wore a squished dark green cap when it was cold. We had all sort of adventures, tremendous fun. We’d dress up as Indian squaws and he’d be a cowboy, coming to rescue us. One year we had a terrific craze for highwaymen and we’d take it in turns for two of us to hold up the other two. We used to take the jewellery Mummy kept in her dressing-table drawers, so we had valuables to relinquish. Someone made us those black eye masks with holes in them; it can’t have been Mummy because she didn’t sew – perhaps it was our nursery nurse. We had a tricorn, too, God knows where that came from. There was an old velvet opera cape that we used to fight over. It always seemed to be Patricia’s turn to wear it.

  It was only later that he grew to feel more deeply for me than for the others, I think. By then they had their sights set on other things; their horizons were widening – in Patricia’s case, that is. Nina’s horizon didn’t widen exactly. It sort of slid across, like a photograph in a slide-show.

  The others didn’t perceive any difference in Jamie, of course. Nor in me. They weren’t inclined to notice me very much, I was their younger sister and a bit galumphing and awkward; and I don’t th
ink they ever really looked at him, or not in that light, anyway. He was just part of the furniture of our childhood, he had been our playfellow for years and there was no reason for them to suppose he’d ever be anything else. He was like a cousin sort of figure really. That’s how they thought of him. Even when we were all grown-ups they never thought I’d have any secrets, that I’d keep anything from them. They thought I was an open book. Patricia believed she was the only one of us who was worth thinking of, the only significant one, if you like. But there were all sorts of things I didn’t tell them, about myself and about other people.

  There were little signs: he’d often try and bring his pony alongside me if we went out riding and he’d perform small courtesies like holding my pony’s bridle when I came to dismount, where the other two were left to slide off unceremoniously. He wouldn’t say anything, but he’d be there, holding the cheek-piece so my pony would stay still. Or when Patricia and Nina were expressing their opinions about something, he’d ask me what I thought. Sometimes when we played doubles, the four of us, he’d say a ball of mine was in when one of the others had called it out. Sometimes I knew myself that it had been out. Once after we’d eaten a picnic – I think I would have been about fifteen – we were all four lying on our backs in some long grass and part of his leg was against mine, the part above the knee but below the thigh; and he didn’t move away and I could feel a sort of tenseness between us, where our legs met. I shifted my position a little bit so that the rest of our legs touched, all down the length of mine. His legs were much longer, even then. It wasn’t that I noticed what his leg felt like so much as that it pressing against me made me acutely aware of my own leg, the heat and shape of it. It almost seemed to prickle, but in a nice way, like pins and needles, only without the hurting part. When we stood up he wouldn’t meet my eye.

  After that I began to see things about him, to look at him differently. Which is funny, because he looked like a crane-fly, really. Articulated, is that the word? Like one of those rulers with hinges that fold out to a great length. He was immensely tall and lanky and his hands were slightly too big for him, which he must have realized because he tended to wear his sleeves pulled down over his wrists. I don’t know whether he had always done this, but I suddenly became aware of it after the time when our legs had touched and it seemed very poignant.

  The thought that he might be ashamed of anything about himself made me want almost to cry. It made me want to take one of his hands in both of mine, to pull him in towards me, but of course I never did. Not then, anyway. That didn’t happen until after the war. I wouldn’t have known how to turn what I was feeling into something that could be communicated to him.

  There was a gentleness. It must seem odd, to meet me now, that I should have been fond of someone like that, but I was softer when I was young. Experience hardens you. If it didn’t, life could break a person. To look at him you might have guessed that he’d have a stammer, that’s the kind of boy he was. He never pushed himself forward, he’d hang back slightly in the same way that a stutterer might. He wasn’t like anyone else. Whether it was because I’d known him since he was a little boy, but it always seemed to me that there was something child-like about him. He had a sweetness of nature, a curiosity and naturalness, something so keen and true, almost other-worldly … it was as if he’d been touched with angels’ wings. As if you could be kept warm on a cold morning by the goodness in him. That will sound fanciful I know, but it’s true. What I’m trying to get at is, you couldn’t not like him. Or more than that, perhaps, you couldn’t not trust him: you could have told from one look at him that he was absolutely honourable and trustworthy. You could have handed him a million pounds and asked him to look after it for you and then disappeared for twenty years and know that he’d have put it somewhere in a safe place and that he’d give it back, untouched. He was the sort of person that if you gave him a sealed envelope it would never even occur to him to open it and sneak a look.

  So that was Jamie. I would never have been allowed to what we used to call walk out with him. There wouldn’t have been any future in it, my parents simply wouldn’t have allowed it. All our county neighbours would have known, you see, that he was the son of the tenants. The only reason that Nina got away with marrying Eric was because he wasn’t from the same patch as we were: people weren’t so apt to look down on him. And she always had Daddy twisted around her little finger. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it any more now, it’s all such a long time ago. Jamie Dickinson. I haven’t said his name out loud for years and years.

  7. Sussex, August 1938

  Julia and two of the older Cadet girls had got themselves into hot water with the officials at the camp. On one of their leafleting afternoons in Worthing they had somehow got hold of a tin of enamel paint and a couple of brushes and had daubed the British Union flash and circle on the side of a theatre, as well as the letters PJ.

  ‘In all honesty, nobody’s saying they shouldn’t have done it. Nobody’s saying that. It was that they were seen doing it, that’s the trouble,’ Nina told Phyllis.

  ‘But they shouldn’t have!’ said Phyllis. ‘It’s completely wrong. It’s vandalism. Hugh will be absolutely livid. I can’t think what must have come over Julia, she’d never have done anything like this before.’

  ‘Still. People who do amateur dramatics are always such terrible busy-bodies. They’ve taken over what was the Picturedrome, you see. Nobody going to the flicks in the old days would have reported them. It’s called the Connaught Theatre, nowadays: they’re all very hoity-toity. It was a group of them coming out after a rehearsal who caught the Cadets.’

  ‘It must have been a dare,’ said Phyllis. ‘I can’t think why ever else she’d do such a thing.’

  ‘They’ve all got crushes on that boy Freddy. ’Spect they did it to impress him. He was their driver, you see.’

  ‘Julia certainly hasn’t got a crush on anyone. She’s much too young,’ said Phyllis. Nina laughed.

  ‘Why PJ, anyway? What does that mean?’ asked Phyllis.

  ‘Perish Judah.’

  ‘Surely that’s taking things rather too far? I don’t suppose any of them have ever even seen a Jew. Well, I mean Julia will have, when we were abroad. But not so as she’d notice.’

  ‘No one who puts the interests of this country first has anything to fear from our lot, the Leader’s quite clear on that. But you can’t ignore the fact that they have a great influence: too much, frankly. You have to question whether they’re putting their own interests before ours. Industry, the newspapers: they’ve got their fingers in a lot of pies. Government, too. Hore-Belisha, our Secretary of State for War: he’s a Jew. Frightful warmonger. Liberal – need I say more? It’s abundantly clear that the Jews and their financiers have a vested concern in trying to goad us into another war against Germany. I’ve heard many speakers say so.’

  ‘I can’t see why anyone would want a war, whatever background they came from. Or religion, or whatever they are. And even if they did, Worthing hardly seems the place to stop them.’

  ‘It’s mostly the people from the London branches who get hot under the collar about it all. It’s much more in evidence up there. You’re not quite up to speed with it all, not that I’m blaming you or anything. It’s because of you living overseas while all this has been building up. People feel there’s a strong threat to British jobs, British businesses. There was some trouble in the East End a couple of years ago which became rather notorious. They’re terrible trouble-makers, these Hebrews, especially at some of our London meetings: they come along just to stir things up for us. And as you know we’ve got a tremendous amount of supporters from those parts: you’ve met many of them at camp. Anyway, this’ll blow over. I don’t believe anyone’s actually cross with Julia and the others for the doing of it, as I say. It’s the being seen. It’s just unfortunate they were in uniform. We don’t want people around and about thinking we’re hooligans.’

  Phyllis wondered whether she cou
ld keep this incident from coming to Hugh’s attention, and asked Julia not to mention it unless he did. There were only a couple of weeks of camp left to run and then Julia and the others would be off to school not long afterwards: it was entirely possible that he need not hear of it. Now that work on the house was beginning he was preoccupied with building matters and unlikely to come to the camp-site, but on the other hand he had become something of a figure in the Union locally and word would probably get out. People gossiped. Julia was, after all, the daughter of two active and by now fairly senior members. And Nina and Eric were well-known at London HQ and beyond, through their work at camp and on Party communications and printing; while Greville was an actual friend of the Leader’s. An errant child with such relatives would be a gift to the newspapers. It would be a disaster if the press got hold of it. Phyllis’s heart sank at the thought of having to tell her husband. Hugh had a great respect for other people’s property and this was vandalism, when all was said and done. He would be furious with Julia and possibly displeased with Phyllis for having allowed their daughter the freedom of camp life, with its emphasis on people from all backgrounds mingling together.