She said, all the vibrancy strangely gone from her voice, “That’s wonderful,” and sat down. Her hands were in her lap, and her smile, emptied suddenly of its warmth, betrayed only despairing appeal.
He closed the door on her and hurried into the street. He walked through the chilly dusk, trembling with anger and frustration. Why didn’t she leave him alone? It was only eight weeks to the wedding, and if she wanted him to hold out that long — and what else could she want after she had already repulsed him? — she ought to leave him alone. But eight weeks, eight weeks! He thought of Rose, the divan behind her, in the shadowed lamplit warmth of her room. The chill of the evening penetrated his clothes and he shivered, thinking of the warmth of her room. He walked faster and faster, bumped into people, felt the jarring shock of them but did not see them. He thought of Rose as warmth, as release, and rest. He was no longer the conqueror of his earlier dreams; he wanted to run to her like a child and yield himself up to her.
He went into a telephone booth, fumbled for pennies and dropped them into the slot. His fingers felt powerless, and the effort of using them was agonising. He dialled Rose’s number. He heard the purr of the bell. He could hardly breathe. He was convinced that there would be no reply. For a terrible second he hoped, crazy with fear, that she would not reply. There was a click and he heard her voice, very soft.
The shock was like a blow. His teeth were chattering. He croaked a senseless jumble of words. “Who is that?” she asked. Her voice was strange on the telephone; higher and thinner than he remembered it. “It’s Jack,” he said jerkily, “Jack, it’s Jack.” Her voice came again, still interrogative. He said, unnaturally loud, “Jack Agass, Jackie Agass.” A pause. He took a deep breath and steadied the receiver against his ear. He shouted, “How are you?” He felt stupid, and did not know what to say next. “Hallo, Jack,” she said, “I’m fine. How are you?” Her voice was puzzled. “I’m fine,” he shouted. She said, “Don’t speak so loudly, Jack. Your voice is deafening.” He sniggered. “Look,” he said, “when can I see you?”
“Oh.”
Another pause. He was sick with suspense; then her voice came over the line, “Is that you breathing I can hear on the line? Is there anything wrong? You haven’t had another one of those turns?”
“No, I’m all right. Look, I want to come round and see you.”
“Of course.” The puzzled tone was still in her voice. She spoke again, “Is it about anything special? Can’t we talk now? Or it is just going to be a social visit?”
Maddened by the way the talk was drawing out, he cried, “Don’t you want me to come? It’s all right with me if you don’t.”
“Don’t be silly, Jack, come whenever you like.”
“Now?”
“I’m sorry. I’m going out in a few minutes. I shan’t be back till late.”
“Tomorrow, dinner-time?”
“I’m fixed up tomorrow evening.”
“Dinnertime, Rosie, midday. I’ll come from work.”
“Thursday evening would be better. I shall be in from seven onwards.”
He wondered how he could bear to wait two days. “All right,” he said, “Thursday. I’ll come.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“I’m all right, I told you.”
“You don’t sound like it. Thursday, then. It’ll be nice, won’t it? Bye-bye.”
He said, “S’long,” hung up the receiver and left the booth. Everything in the street seemed unreal. How could he wait, through two endless days, till Thursday?
Chapter Three
One evening a fortnight later Rose was standing in a shop doorway in Oxford Circus, waiting for Jack. She loved the West End streets at this time of the evening, the shop windows like great cubes of yellow light, each containing its own pattern of beautiful shapes and colours, and each shedding a pallid glare upon the dark, thronged pavements. She looked with admiration at a fur coat in a window on her left, and imagined it, black, glossy and graceful, on her own back. She had a taste for luxuries; most of her friends chaffed her about it and told her it ill became the rebellious opinions she expressed; she remained serenely indifferent to them and went on longing for lovely things.
By arriving early she had broken a long-standing rule of hers; always to let the man get there first. She was not an advocate of chronic lateness as a means of impressing men; the tactics of coyness and ostentatious femininity disgusted her and conflicted with the energy and efficiency she displayed in all her doings and demanded of her associates. But her life involved her in many dealings, whose purpose she took seriously, with men. It was important to her that she should always keep the upper hand in these affairs; and to do so, to seize and maintain the initiative, she was not above the use of art. To let the man get there first, even if only by a few minutes, and then to sweep down on him out of the crowd, often ensured, if she continued skilfully enough, that he remained morally under her thumb for the rest of the evening.
As the crowds streamed past her she thought of the events of the last fortnight and wondered why she had not only neglected her rule this evening but why she had troubled to meet Jack at all. She was tired. Her round of engagements had been particularly merciless for the last few weeks. She was a young woman of immense energy. Her energy had, if anything, increased since her girlhood, although it was no longer the torrential, unpredictable ardour that had endowed her in early youth with a wild charm, but was controlled and deliberate, so that her friends regarded her as hard and tireless. Nevertheless she was tired. Her character forbade her ever to admit it, but sometimes she spent an evening lying exhausted across her bed, and this was what her body had craved to do before she had come out tonight.
Was it boredom that had brought her? She could rarely endure a blank evening. She dreaded being alone. When she was alone for a few hours she suffered from an ennui in which there arose speculations and misgivings that called the whole of her present life into question. That was why she would put up with almost any company rather than remain alone.
Was it nostalgia? She was ashamed of sentiment, even in her secret thoughts — she refused, for instance, to keep souvenirs although it hurt her to destroy them — but she could not help looking back with tenderness, from time to time, at her girlhood; and Jack, like an apparition from the past, brought with him sweet and painful memories of her own adolescence.
Was it loneliness? She had a multitude of acquaintances, but there was no-one to whom she could open her heart, except Mick and Nancy.
But even if she were to admit to loneliness, which she dared not do, a man of Jack’s type had nothing to offer her. She was fastidious concerning the character and behaviour of her intimates. One man had amused her by telling her that she was a snob; another had pleased her by calling her aristocratic. It was not people’s social standing that interested her. She looked for certitude, for assurance, in their behaviour. “I like people,” she had once said, “who walk about as if they belong in the world and as if it belongs to them; not people who act as if they belong to nothing and nothing belongs to them.” When she uttered the condemnatory part of this pronouncement, it was Lamb Street that she had in mind. She could not bear the childlike incapacity which seemed to her to stamp the people she had left behind in Lamb Street. It had been a hard fight to root it out of herself; and she was always afraid that she might still betray signs of it; hence she hated it all the more. This alone would have kept her away from the street, once she had escaped (for this was how she thought of her departure), although more practical reasons existed.
It was not only boredom, however, or nostalgia, or the fact that her anger with Jack had faded into an amused pity, that had brought her here. It was clear that he was in some kind of distress, and she wanted to help him if she could. In the old days she had always played the part of the senior, although she was the younger of the two; in recent years she had become the confidante and counsellor of a considerable number of men; she liked to think that it
was charity that inspired her new relationship with Jack, but in reality her vanity, which was always demanding fresh nourishment from men, played just as large a part.
Since his telephone call, when her curiosity had overcome her annoyance and led her to see him again, they had met twice. He had given plenty of evidence of his unrest, but he had not revealed its cause. She had asked him why he was spending so much time away from Joyce. “Oh, she’s all right,” he had answered in the strained, defiant voice in which he always spoke to her, “All her time shopping and whatnot these days, round the dressmaker with her mum and all that lark. No time for me. I thought you’d like to be a pal and keep us company, you know, like, just for a bit.”
Their two evenings together had not been pleasant for her. They were unlike anything she had previously experienced with men, and left her feeling strained and provoked. They were so crazy and inconsequential as to seem dreamlike, yet the more puzzled she became the more she wanted to follow them through to their outcome, just as, however agitating and disagreeable a dream, interrupted at night, might have been, she always tried to go back to sleep and see how it would turn out.
On the first evening he had sat morosely at her flat, saying little, drinking a lot of her brandy and casting occasional furtive looks at her, until in embarrassment she had suggested going out. “Of course,” he had mumbled, “all for a good time, ain’t you? Come on, then, I won’t let you down.” They had gone to a dinner dance, and he had spent a lot of money, repeatedly showing her his wallet in a way that perplexed her, and saying, to her annoyance, “’S all right, girl. Plenty more where that comes from.” The second time, he had taken her to a third-rate night club where, in spite of his efforts to appear at home, he had shown himself clearly to be ill at ease and in unfamiliar surroundings, spending even more money than before on the most offensive imitation of champagne that she had ever tasted. She had protested at his prodigality, and he had shouted back at her with horrible gaiety, “Don’t you worry! Jackie Agass may live in Islington, but he’s got as much bloody rhino as any other bastard. And don’t you forget!”
She could not help knowing that he wanted her. His fierce, quick glances, his sullen silences, his brutal grip on her arm as he steered her through doorways, and the way in which he lagged at her heels as they walked in the streets, gave her a feeling of being dogged. This was the one thing which, like most women, she could not bear. She might submit, however little she thought of a man, to outright importunities, out of appetite, pity, good humour or even sheer weariness of spirit; but when a man did nothing but haunt her it awoke a contempt in her which she could never overcome. Moreover, she had no idea that Jack was in love with her, and thought that it was from contempt for her that his desire sprang. He apparently imagined that (to use the language of Lamb Street) she was ‘easy’. He was ‘after a bit’ to pass the time while his Joyce was occupied elsewhere. In the two evenings Rose and Jack had spent together, there had not been a single moment of real intimacy. Rose had not found a chance to speak about herself, and in any case, the more she saw of Jack the less inclined she felt to do so. She would not be sorry to get him off her hands; after their first evening she had given him the slip at her doorway; after their second she had taken a taxi home and left him in the street; she supposed she would do the same tonight. However, she could not help pitying him, and she had sent him — partly to soothe any hurt she had inflicted on his feelings, partly to bring matters to a head — an affectionate and sympathetic note suggesting this appointment. She had excused her hurried departure on the last occasion (‘I was in such a hurry to grab the taxi before it got away’), she had thanked him for a lovely evening, and she had suggested that it was time for ‘a real heart-to-heart’. The phrase, like the ponderous jocularity of the rest of the note, was selected to please him, but she shuddered as she wrote it. Before she finally dismissed him she wanted to satisfy her generosity, her curiosity and her vanity by getting to the bottom of his troubles.
“Who’s gonna buy you that one?” Jack was at her elbow, looking with her at the fur coat in the shop window.
“Hallo.” She smiled without turning. “It’s a dear, isn’t it. I might get it for a Christmas present yet, if I drop a hint in the right place.”
“I bet!” Jack’s voice thickened. “I tell you this, whoever he is, he ain’t the only one got the money to burn if he’s treated right.”
She looked at him askance. “Oh, well, it’ll do to dream about in the meantime.” She turned away from the window. “Let’s go somewhere quiet tonight, Jack. We’ve never really had a chance to hear the sound of our own voices, have we?”
Fright twitched across his face, and in a voice drained of strength he said, “If you like, Rosie.”
She took him to an Italian restaurant in Frith Street, led him to a table and ordered food and wine. He sat dumbly, looking down at his fists clenched side by side on the table, He did not take his raincoat off until she told him to. “How’s the job?” she asked. “Still going strong?”
“Nah,” he said without looking up, “Goin’ on short time. Next month. Reckons he’ll keep us all on, though, the old fella. The boss I mean.”
“Is that what’s worrying you?”
“Nah.” He started on his ravioli, still refusing to look at her.
She tried more questions, but each time he answered her briefly and remained hunched over his plate. She contented herself for a while with letting him eat, urging him to drink and refilling his glass as soon as he emptied it.
“I like this food,” she said, “don’t you?”
“Ah.” He looked up at last. “Had it before. In Italy. They don’ ’alf eat there. Bloody sight to watch, I can tell you. Thin little girl, bloody great plate of spaghetti, pasta they call it, twice her size it looks. See her whop it inside her. Wallop, all gorn, and she wipes the plate. And that’s only a start. Bloody appetizer. There you are, hanging over the back of your chair ready to bust, and there she is waiting to start the real meal. Gaw, talk about women!”
“You sound as if you could.”
“What?”
“Talk about women.”
“Me?” He made a reminiscent little sucking noise with his tongue. “Here, this wine’s all right, ain’t it? Used to drink pints of it. The ol’ vino. Shaved in it once. We was hard up for water, dug in ’undred yards from a wine cellar we was. Bloody great barrels. Hundreds of ’em. Can y’ imagine?” He was flushed now with wine and warmth. “Ah, some right tarts there was over there. Never even had to ask ’em. Opens her front door one of ’em does, points to her skirt and says, “Buono!” Walks right in, me and my mate. She didn’t ’alf give us what for. Glad to get out, the pair of us, and I ain’t ashamed to say it. Well, I mean, not to you. Catch me talking like this to Joycie. Ooh, some hopes! Throw two bloody fits and end up on the clothes line, she would. Different with you, though, ain’t it? I know a sport when I see one.”
His expression had relaxed, and he rattled on, with the pathetic uplifted smile of a small boy bragging. She assumed her favourite pose, aloof but receptive. She had learned that the best way to assert her mastery over men was to remain silent and let them talk. They submitted to her because, once they had lost control of their tongues and spewed up all their confidences without receiving any in return, they felt themselves morally in bond to her. It was this self-control — with which she had overcome her girlhood habit of pouring out all her self in talk — that gave her some of her physical attraction. When she was still or silent she seemed to blaze all the more with contained energy. She made a man feel that he was the only one who could discern it behind the amused, sympathetic scrutiny with which she provoked him to keep on talking; while he spoke his curiosity grew, and forced him to talk still more, in the hope of discovering her mysterious inner self and of provoking the volcanic outburst of which, however subdued, she always seemed on the verge.
She scarcely paid attention to what Jack was saying. It was sufficient that he was
talking, more and more recklessly. In a little while, when his mind had altogether lost its power to check his eager, betraying tongue, she would strike with a sudden question. In the meantime she kept her liquid and sympathetic eyes on him. If he imagined that her steadfast dilated gaze was for him, or that he was the cause of the little light of brightness and pleasure that danced in her eyes (and he probably did, for the note of excited hope grew louder and louder in his voice) he was wrong, for what in reality attracted her fascinated stare and absorbed all her thoughts was her own image in the mirror behind him.
She was delighted with herself. What she saw in the mirror filled her with love, and her eyes were like a lover’s. She sat upright, but tranquil and relaxed, her head tilted slightly back, her lips parted. She admired the harmonies of her face, soft and full, yet appearing small within the compact casque of black hair; the hint of audacity conveyed by her bright eyes, her small mouth and the saucy curve of her chin; the soft and sensuous texture of her skin, whose matt pallor was mottled from beneath by the faintest violet bloom, and which set off all the more vividly the jet gleam of her hair and the bright red flower of her lips.
She was settled in her favourite pose. Life for her was a series of poses; not the exaggerated and laughable postures clumsily copied from the princesses of the cinema screen, to which, in one stage of her childhood, her confused ambitions had driven her; but a series of attitudes, the very attitudes which caused her acquaintances to refer to her as ‘natural’, ‘unaffected’, and ‘spontaneous’, but all of which were premeditated. She had learned how to simulate, in silence, profundities of thought and feeling that were in reality beyond her; she had in stock ‘spontaneities’ of speech, movement and gesture to meet every situation; her trump card was always the contemplative, which could be infinitely varied but was always effective. The essence of her struggle to establish herself in a wider and more satisfying world than that of Lamb Street had been the effort to harness her ardour (which might, as with many other working girls, have driven her hither and thither, witless and credulous, perhaps to disaster) and to turn it from her master into her servant. She was, too, still subconsciously not ‘at home’ in the wider world, and however successful she was in winning admiration she still remained secretly self-conscious, unable to relax her watch over herself. She had, in fact, in the struggle to take advantage of her character, changed it. True spontaneity had vanished with her first youth. Now, as long as she was awake she was an actress; so successful an actress that no-one had ever suspected her of artifice and she was often pointed to as one of those delightful people, natural and unspoilt, who are at home wherever they go and carry their passionate love of life with them like a torch. Tonight, with poor simple Jack, an uncritical ambassador from Lamb Street, as her only audience, her vigilance could relax, her confidence could expand. She sparkled.
Rosie Hogarth Page 22