by Henry Green
“Why? I’m kind to everybody.”
“Kindness doesn’t count, Ann.”
“Sometimes I think I’m too nice,” she went on as though she had not heard. “I know Mummy thinks so. She says I shouldn’t try to comfort people when they get miserable.”
“I suppose it’s a question of degree,” he said.
“Well they will ring up, and will be desperate, and then I manage to go round, or motor down if I possibly can. Could any fellow human do less, Arthur?”
“Isn’t Shone a bit young to be getting so desperate?”
“Oh I wasn’t thinking of Terry just for the moment. No, sometimes, when Campbell’s distracted, he telephones, when he’s stuck in his work, and so on.”
“What’s he at now?” Mr. Middleton asked.
“An anthology of love poetry he’s to call ‘Doting.’ Don’t you agree it’s a marvellous title?”
“Well, you know doting, to me, is not loving.”
“I don’t follow,” she said with a small frown.
“To my mind love must include adoration of course, but if you just dote on a girl you don’t necessarily go so far as to love her. Loving goes deeper.”
“Well,” she suggested “perhaps the same words could mean different things to men and women.”
“Possibly,” he said. “Perhaps not.”
“So anyway, quite often, Mummy and I are sitting alone after dinner, and you can be sure her poor heart is full of where Dads is, and then the phone rings so that we race each other. I always win. After which, as likely as not, it only turns out to be Campbell who’s got stuck in his work, and wants my company.”
“Yes,” Mr. Middleton admitted. “I sympathize with you. Things can’t be easy back home at present.”
“You are sweet, you really are. Am I being an awful bore?”
“Of course not. But tell me, how can this Campbell get stuck over an anthology?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be cut and dried to choose among so many poems after all.”
“So he reads them out to you for your opinion?”
“Oh no, we play records, as a rule, to take his mind off. He has this thing, too, about jazz, you see.”
“So I understood,” Mr. Middleton said, in a wondering voice.
“But he can’t listen alone.”
“Why not?”
“Campbell says jazz is written for crowds and so mustn’t be heard if you’re one in a room.”
“I see. Then has he asked you yet to share his loneliness for good?”
She frowned. “I don’t think that’s very nice at all,” she said. “It might be almost nasty,” she added in a sad voice “or else you’re not so understanding as you seem. But of course Campbell would love to live in sin with me and I might adore it too, yet I’m not going to. Although, as I said, he could really be rather wonderful.”
“I’m sorry,” Arthur apologized. “I was confused.”
“What about?”
“Everything Ann.”
“Who’s to blame you,” she suddenly laughed. “Look at me! I get so tangled up over my own feelings I often don’t know where I am myself.”
“Wouldn’t it help to talk this over with your mother, then?”
“I couldn’t bother Mummy now, just when she’s so worried.”
“And yet that might take Paula out of herself, a bit,” he suggested.
“In which case you don’t know my mother,” she said. “Anything about me could only be yet another great worry for her.”
“Yes I see. All right. But to go back to what you were saying, Annabel. Aren’t you taking things too seriously? Because you needn’t think your emotional life will ever not be in a tangle, dear.”
“You say I’m so crazy I shan’t once be able to snap out of it?” she demanded with what appeared to be humble indignation.
“Of course not,” he pleaded with her. “Take my own case, now, for example. Half the time I don’t know where I am, in my emotional life I mean, whether I’m coming or going.”
“If you ask me seriously to believe that,” she objected “then all I can say is your memory must be short, or else you intend to forget. I don’t know the sort of life you used to lead but, just for a minute, look back to what it must have been before you married and had Peter.”
“I often do.”
“You do!” she cried. “And you say you’re worse off at the moment? Well, of course, I’m sorry,” she corrected herself “that’s not your argument, but you maintain, because this is what you’re saying, isn’t it, that you have a worse time now than me who’s simply got no one, or anything!! Or have I gone too far again?” she asked in a contrite voice. “Still, I don’t feel you can remember properly. Because I won’t agree. So long as I live I won’t!”
“The fact is,” he explained with calm “the minute one begins a discussion of mutual troubles or miseries, it invariably becomes a kind of fierce competition as to who, in effect, is the worse off.”
“Well, why not?”
“But Ann, I was trying to help.”
“I’m sure you were. Only how?”
“What I was after was an attempt to show that you were not alone in your old boat.”
“Even if I wasn’t, in which way would that alter things?” she demanded.
“Then you won’t have any comfort?”
“What do you mean?” she muttered with a lost look. “Here you are, married with a lovely son, what can the matter be?”
“How about your own parents, then? There’s plenty wrong with them.”
“But you’re happily married!”
“Are you trying to make out you know, better than I do, what’s the matter with me?”
“Well, all right, then,” Miss Paynton crossly announced. “And to think that you even own your own house,” she added. “But, because you at least see I do realize what my trouble is, just admit, then, I’ve simply no one, and nothing.”
“I remember a working man once said to my face ‘what have you to worry about, you’re rich’ ” Mr. Middleton told the girl.
“Oh, how could I mean money?” she protested.
“I don’t either,” he assured her.
“But you must understand,” she protested. “Compared with my case you’re well off beyond the dreams of avarice.” Then she laughed. “Or perhaps not beyond my dreams,” she added, suddenly gay. “Because, of course, I do want such a vast great deal.”
She leant across and squeezed his hand on the table cloth. Then changed the subject. She began to take infinite pains, and soon had him smiling at a long story about one of her girlfriends.
When it was time for her to go back to work she said “Do please ask me again. You’ve done such a lot of good. Promise!”
“I will, if I may,” he replied as he raised his hat.
•
That same evening Mr. Middleton worked as usual, after dinner, in the study, while his wife sat with Peter in the living room of their flat. The boy was seated opposite Diana on a sofa with the whole day’s newspaper piled around him, the sheets separately strewn about to left and right halfway up to his shoulders. Two table-lamps were lit, one for Mrs. Middleton to read by in her armchair and the other, so placed as to command the empty chair sacred to his father between this sofa and the fire, gave the boy but little light, although he had tilted the shade so that the bulb shone into his mother’s eyes. And, as he was done with the day’s news, he now breathed heavily over a catalogue of gramophone records.
“Why don’t you change to where Arthur always sits, darling?” Mrs. Middleton suggested. “Then you’d be able to see better.”
“But he’ll come back any time,” the young man replied.
“I don’t think so, not yet,” she said. “He does work so hard, he has such a lot to do. Because you’ll ruin your eyes like this.”
“No I won’t.”
“What’s the matter with you tonight?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“O
h Peter, are you getting bored with London again?”
“Not more than usual.”
“Where would you like to be, then? In the country?”
“Well it might make a change.”
“We go through this every holiday,” she lamented. “But there’s no one to visit! And hotels are so expensive! Look, if you’re desperate why won’t you take someone out? I’m not sure you’re old enough yet but I’ve my number two account for your expenses, and I’d provide the wherewithal.”
“There’s no one to go with.”
“How about Annabel?”
“Oh, not her!”
“Then why don’t you ring up one of your school friends? What are they there for? Some of them must live in London.”
“God no.”
“Which doesn’t exactly make anything easier, does it?” Mrs. Middleton commented ruefully. “Peter, don’t say you have something against Annabel now?”
“When did I ever even like her, Mother?”
“But she’s been such a companion for you all these long years!”
“Well there are chaps at St. Olaf’s say they don’t particularly care even for their sisters.”
Diana laughed. “Yes,” she agreed “I can remember my brothers were the same. Still Annabel does adore you darling. Why, she took you out only last week!”
“That was no more than to pay Father back for all he had spent.”
“And I don’t think so,” Mrs. Middleton protested, in an unconfident way. “In any case Arthur asked her out to lunch this afternoon. You wouldn’t wish to rely on her inviting you again, surely?”
“He did? He does see quite a bit of her now!”
“Why shouldn’t your Father stand lunch to whosoever he likes?” Diana enquired patiently. “I’m glad he can relax at times, with all that work of his.”
“But, I mean, Ann’s young enough to be my sister.”
“That’s no reason for him not to invite the child, is it?”
The boy gave a disdainful hoot, at which Mrs. Middleton laughed a bit, with a show of confidence. “I know your Father,” she said. “You must at least allow me that. Nonsense!”
“Well I think it’s silly at his age.”
“Now Peter, I’m not going to have you get tiresome over the holidays. Oh I realize it can’t be easy here in London but we’ve nowhere else to go that we can afford, have we, and in any case this is not the right time of the year for shooting.”
“No, I know.”
“You’ve got to learn to take your pleasures where you find yourself,” she went on equably. “You can’t suppose I like to sit here alone, while you’re away, night after night, with Arthur at work downstairs.”
“Well, why does he?”
“Someone’s got to earn the money to keep you at school and pay for all this, Peter.”
“But doesn’t he invite you out to lunch sometimes?”
“Of course. Yet, if he wants to ask Ann, one’s only too pleased that he should be getting his mind off a bit. Now why don’t you take your gun to the shooting school and put in some practice?”
After which they cheerfully discussed this and other methods for him to get through the holidays, till it was time for bed.
•
The next Monday Arthur Middleton was sitting opposite Miss Paynton at the same corner table of that restaurant they used every week for lunch.
“Now we’ve established a habit by coming here, what shall we talk about?” he gaily enquired.
“Tell me of when we first met,” she said.
“You were six.”
“Go on. Then how was I dressed?”
“With a pink bow in your hair.”
“Oh I expect. But which time of day was it?”
“Lunch.”
“Well, don’t stop. What frock did I wear?”
“I’m sorry but all this was a long time now. Twelve whole years, you know.”
“I can remember all my dresses,” she replied. “Then how did we talk?”
“Di was busy with Prior and Paula, whilst I sat next you,” he began. “We discussed cleaning our teeth and got on, when no one was looking, to making terrible faces at each other.”
She sniffed. “That doesn’t sound terribly exciting,” she announced.
“Can’t you really remember, Ann?”
“But there’s nothing to remind me, surely?”
“No, I meant before lunch that day. The rabbit hutch.”
“All this is news to me,” she assured him. “And you mustn’t expect a girl to bring to mind everything. That was so long ago.”
“Well, thank God,” he said, in what seemed a strained voice. “I know I shan’t ever forget and I’ve been afraid all these years you might have taken a turn!!”
“What is all this?”
“You see, you brought me out alone with you before lunch, to inspect your rabbit.”
“Nip? Or Tig? No, this must have been earlier. Why you can’t mean Doughnut?”
“How should I remember at this distance?”
“Well, continue Arthur. Tell!”
“It was a big rabbit and a large hutch,” he began with obvious reluctance. “About three feet off the ground. You’d fixed a sloping plank so that when you turned your Doughnut out he wouldn’t have to jump down. D’you recall where the hutch was, because that’s everything. In the ruined chapel, on a lawn which used to be the floor, the greenest grass. I suppose you could get used to most of it but the walls, the extraordinary brick and blue ivy and stillness, absolutely not a sound, because I remember the sun was very strong that morning—well, I imagine, I shan’t ever forget your rabbit twitching its nose at you while you got down on hands and knees to show me how it had to climb to get back. I thought the ladder would break under your weight, it was only elm. Then you clambered on top of the hutch, to simply become your rabbit. You crouched on the roof to show me how Doughnut, or however it was called, crouched, and the damn animal was beneath you all the time so I thought the whole thing must collapse under your weight and kill the wretched thing. All of which made me say for you to come down, but you paid no attention, and, in the end, I caught hold of your ankle to pull you off but, Ann, you screamed! Can’t you remember?”
“How stupid,” she commented. “Why on earth should I do that?”
“It was most significant,” he gravely said.
“So what?” Miss Paynton asked.
“You yelled like a stuck pig. I thought your parents would be on me in a flash.”
“Why Arthur?”
“Well I did have your ankle in my fist. You wore blue cotton socks.”
“I’ll bet I didn’t. Not blue at any age.”
“Yes, it is so. I shan’t ever forget.”
“And so, then?” she demanded. “After all, what makes this very serious?”
“Embarrassment, Ann,” he replied.
“Good God,” she said. “Then you are really a mass of nerves inside?”
“I’m allergic to children if you want to know.”
“You mustn’t even pretend you are about your Peter.”
“I am with little girls,” he said, in a satisfied voice.
“Up to what age?” Miss Paynton asked.
“Now don’t you poke fun at me,” he said, and changed the subject.
•
That same week, on a summer evening, Mr. Middleton walked a friend home from his club.
“No, but what do you really think about them?” he was persisting.
“Not much,” Mr. Addinsell replied.
“All right,” Arthur Middleton admitted. “But one thing you must agree, that they simply wave it about in front of one.”
“Females always have and will,” his companion said.
“You know what happened to me? Took my wife out with this girl and she leans on a balcony on purpose so I can look right down the front of her dress.”
“What might her name be?” Mr. Addinsell demanded.
“Is n
one of your damned business,” Arthur Middleton laughed. “But things are very different now, aren’t they, to when we first went out in London.”
“I don’t know, I wouldn’t be too sure,” his companion demurred.
“Meaning I could be at the dangerous age, Charles? Oh well, all the same, really young girls never have behaved like that in the whole history of the world.”
“What do you care, after all?”
“Because she’s simply destroying me, the little tart,” Mr. Middleton sang out in indignation. “I can’t sleep at night any more when I think of her,” he said. “In a week or two I’ll even be obsessed.”
“Oh get it over with, Arthur, and go to bed with the child.”
“I could, of course, with a bit of luck, only I’m so upset it might make me worse. But Charles, your own boy’s only eight, isn’t he?”
“Rising nine, Joe. What difference is there in that?”
“You see this little bit is the one we almost always bring along, each time we take Peter out and about London. She’s nineteen, or a trifle over.”
“Well then, she’s two years ahead of him, isn’t she?”
“About that. But look here, I wouldn’t! You must see that. I couldn’t! Not with the girl we trot out for Peter.”
“You’d get between the sheets in five years’ time with your boy’s own wife, if I know you, old man,” Mr. Addinsell guffawed. “Yet why d’you suppose Diana asks this nameless young lady along? Tell me.”
“I’ve told you already. To bring the lad company.”
“Not on your life Arthur. The purpose is to keep you gay.”
Mr. Middleton gave a snort. “But not for me to be gay in bed with, you can count on that.”
“Perhaps you may be right there,” Charles Addinsell admitted. “Still, I’ve never known such a trifle hold a good man down before, not yet at all events.”
“The girl never would.”
“How can you tell, Arthur, if you haven’t tried? There’s all sorts of things come into bed, where they’re concerned, at their age. Curiosity for one. Impatience. Anything. And then, they imagine men as old as we are won’t be a bother afterwards.”
“I suppose I do seem like a grandparent in her eyes.”
“So what? When you were nineteen didn’t you consider your aunts’ lady friends?”
“No, honest to God, I don’t think I did.”