We were at the Ideal Homes Exhibition, pressing through the crowd in the kitchen section, pressing against the ropes guarding those setpiece kitchens—those that so rack the nerves, as though they belong to someone else, and one had intruded—and she looked suddenly serious:
‘You know, George is a simply wonderful cook. It’s funny in a man, isn’t it? He’s quite the professional. You never tasted anything like George’s scrambled eggs. I suppose it’s a kind of touch. Yes.’
I said nothing, but took care to glance long and longingly at her profile; it reassured me to look at her.
We went to a film. It was a back-stage affair, the heroine wanted to sing in a Broadway musical and so became an usherette in a night-club in order to faint at the feet of the tall, curly-haired bandleader. Afterwards, Desirée leant across to me and whispered in great confidence:
‘She’s the spitting image of Kay. Kay’s just like that. Honour bright—Kay’ll get an idea into her head, any crazy idea—and go off and do it there and then! You can’t say a word! Once it was farm-work—and now she’s put her name down for Spanish at the Polly. Spanish! You can’t stop Kay. Yes.’
I never felt quite so indifferent to Kay as to the others; she was a girl. She may have monopolized too much of my Desirée’s worship—but she was still a girl. There was nothing of the slaphappy virile George. Nor of Norbert, who became perhaps the most sinister of the three. One suspected Norbert of having the worst appeal—an indefinable appeal. Something slow and unseen. Of Norbert she said:
‘He’s the quiet type. You can’t fathom Norbert. But when he gets going—look out! It’s always the same with the quiet ones, isn’t it? Do you know—he’s read all sorts of books. All sorts. Yes.’
George. Kay. Norbert. They assumed the legendary but remarkably real qualities of historical characters. Her descriptions defined them as the drawings in history books define kings: fabulous figures, yet possible; one believes in them, but sees them only in imaginative outline. Had she shown me photographs—as often chance acquaintances will reach for their wallets and pull forth the tired likenesses of families and friends—I would have seen George, Kay and Norbert in humble monochrome, small, remote in time, exposed in the nudity of group and grin, no longer of significance. But she showed me no such monochrome emetic. And the shapes of these three still glittered in giant and treacherous colours of the imagination.
*
But finally I met them.
Desirée and I had been seeing each other for three or four weeks. Once, even, we had met on a Sunday. Sunday was her special day for meeting these three, and this one was granted only because George and Kay and Norbert were away on a day trip, something on a steamer—and Desirée had desisted for lack of a love for water. Not of lack of love for them, nor love for me. I suppose I was for her a convenient sort of companion. There was—at that time—neither flirtation nor passion. A few frightened compliments from me—and from her placid acceptance. I knew this could not last for long—if it did, it would develop into a confirmed ‘friendly’ companionship, the requiem that begins ‘dear old Clifford’ and lasts for ever. But I was determined to move carefully; moreover, I was enchanted and wanted to act sincerely; moreover, I was scared.
Then one Wednesday she invited me to tea again on the Sunday.
‘You must meet George and Kay. And Norbert.’
A contraction of the stomach, the doom-seizure before the dentist. Sunday tea, the special hour, George’s and Kay’s and Norbert’s! I began to stutter my refusals; but her look of surprise—as if anyone could refuse such an opportunity!—and my own curiosity decided the affair. That evening, as we said good-night, I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. It was the first time. I think it was because I wanted to affirm some personal bond between us, some degree of possession with which I could defend myself when we met those three.
Sunday came. At four o’clock I knocked on Desirée’s front door. Her room was upstairs on the first floor. Not until we were up the stairs, not until I had puffed up my awkward courage on the dark landing, did she say so brightly:
‘No one’s here yet. You’ll just have to talk to this child.’
A large room, a sunny afternoon—the sun made a gentility of the fawn wallpaper, the daffodils, the tea-cups.
On the sideboard plates of sandwiches, crustless little triangles threading a line of pink paste: rock cakes as big as large buttons: a bright yellow square of plain cut cake: green tea-cups: five paper napkins. Desirée was much brighter than usual. I remember saying:
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
Quick as a dart came the response from that dear round face, palely animated:
‘I don’t mind if you burst into flame.’
When I was almost again calmed, the ring came on the bell. The springs of the divan echoed as up Desirée jumped. She was off downstairs—the room around me grew quiet and restless as the door below opened and a shouting and laughing as of many people crowded up with a dreadful clattering of feet. I remember standing up, then sitting down again. In they came.
To me, shaking hands with each, they loomed as large and presenceful as I had foreseen. But then as we sat down, as the first high talking lowered and slowed, as the blood cleared and the room moved into clearer focus—those three took on fresh definition. In three distinct stages. First, there had been the large looming of introduction. Then the shock of realizing that though recognizable in manner, in physical shape each of them was very different from what I had imagined. George I had seen as square-faced and crisp-haired: instead he was all circular, a circular face, with other inner circles made by a cherub mouth and hummock-round cheeks and circular eyebrows high above round surprised eyes. Kay should have been keen-faced and inquisitive—instead she turned out Scots-speaking and firm-jawed, wearing a bow in her hair, and trousers: she had the appearance of a grimly serious girl playing the kind of true-blue young housewife one sees in advertisements for soapflakes. Above her right breast she wore a brooch in the form of a telephone dial, with the inscription DIAL LOV. Norbert I had only imagined as a pair of spectacles. He had none. He was bloodless, with a yellowish skin—his black hair grew and had been clipped far down the neck, smearing it with a shadow like dark cycle-grease. He wore at least the impression of spectacles, he kept his eyes down and withdrawn, he concerned himself secretly with the carpet by his shoes.
However—they retained their presence, for me their mastery. But as tea was eaten and variously we talked, the third stage occurred. It was as if physically they were shrinking. One by one they came into sharper focus—the large blur lensed into the smaller clearer figures. I found in fact that they were all as nervous as I was: their impregnability had been my own projection. As I caught the eye of one or the other they acted always in either of two ways—they were whipped to a quick brightness, or slowed into a surly cage of nonchalance: thus they would either chatter too brightly, or turn away purposively to show that one did not exist. They began to show, too, small individual faults. George, a lively one, enjoyed too much his own jokes—while he never laughed at them, he looked round every time for approval. I remember, for instance, how he asked for more cake:
‘Desirée! Desirée, I desire you—to chuck me noch ein rock cake—’
And while at this sally Desirée was still slowly smiling, quick Kay chipped in:
‘Coming over, one R.C.’
Kay was a tomboy, a boy-girl; though she never rejected her feminity, she liked to be ‘one of the chaps.’ When from his superior shadow, during a pause, Norbert enunciated with a sly smile:
‘Angels passing overhead. Or is it twenty-five to?’
Then Kay came in with:
‘Angels or no angels, says I, what’s the dirt?’
‘Dirt, did you say? Did I hear her say the “dirt”?’
‘Come on, chaps—George, what offers?’
‘Me? We-e-ll. Now if I was to say, to say that I do hear, I do hear how a certain party—no names—was observ
ed at ten pip emma entering the portals of one public house not a hundred miles from one institution to wit the Polly in the company of …’
‘George!’
‘Kay?’
‘Objection over-ruled.’
‘Thank you, Norbert. In the company, as I was saying, of none other than the Spanish instructor—’
‘George, that’s hitting a chap below the belt! Come on, wherever did you hear such a thing‚ out with it—’
‘At my mother’s knee—or some other low joint….’
Peals of laughter. And then I remember Kay, pretending to be outraged, turned on Norbert:
‘Well it’s a poor story, isn’t it, Nor?’
And slowly Norbert answered, after a pause long enough to wrinkle up his forehead, a pause for pronouncement:
‘Mauvais in parts, like the reverend ovoid.’
Norbert, more than the others, could never say anything quite straight, his ponderous facetions leered themselves out like the editorials of cycling magazines or the weighty patter of a Lancashire comedian. Often, in fact, he assumed a Lancashire accent. With Norbert, a lie was never anything else but a ‘terminological inexactitude.’ Yet he was plainly considered the brains of the party—his reading, I think, came valiantly from the shorter manuals on biology, engineering, even philosophy. He could only express himself in phrases spoken it seemed in capital letters, dogma of the short road. But most often he fell below even this standard. I remember him standing up, tea-cup in one hand, another hand Napoleonic under his lapel:
‘Notwithstanding sundry setbacks on the part of persons present that we shall refrain from naming—san faryan and honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense—it is my deep pleasure to announce as a vote of heartfelt thanks to our esteemed hostess is deemed advisable by one and all….’
Thus, again, George, Kay and Norbert. It was not until many days later, days after that inaugural tea-party, that a fourth development in our relationship occurred: a fourth I could never have foreseen.
But meanwhile that tea-party proceeded. Not much can be said of it. At one point the wireless was switched on and we were cheered by the violins of a Winter Garden on the South Coast. A silver band from the North took over, and was switched off. Then began a period of longer reminiscence—the first battling of tongues was over—and while George and Kay talked of their lives we nodded and smiled and smoked. I remember going over to the window. Small spring flies hurried their folded wings about the pane. I stood there for a long time looking down at the neat Sunday street. The only open shop was a tea-shop, a home-cooked establishment, its name angled in tall plastic green capitals on a black background: in the window, daffodils and saffron-yellow cakes: one could imagine, beyond the plate-glass window, on the little black chairs, the sipping of clear, violet-coloured tea. And George spoke on behind about his camping holiday near Dunoon:
‘… smashing site we found, nice and sheltered, nice and dry. Everything in the garden was lovely. And best of all, nice and smooth—a lovely spot of turf for your groundsheet. Well. Well, then lights out. But comes the dawn and we wake up—and blimey-old-Riley you should have heard! Moans and groans. Groans and moans. You’d have thought an earthquake’d come in the night, the bumps there were. Right underneath our sheets, bumps like Mount Everest. Know what it was? Moles. I’m not telling a lie. Moles….’
All the time I was conscious of the nearness of my Desirée—delighted, pale, serene. She seldom said more than ‘Yes’—but that to everything. A tender, understanding sigh of a ‘Yes’ modulating through two long, downward caressive notes. Even when she herself said something she had to end it with the same ‘yes’. Nothing disturbed her. Placid, infinitely affirmative, for me she held the room. Whatever I said, to whomsoever—I said it to her. I felt her near me—and sometimes looking out of the window, or just into the corner beneath the thin table legs, I forgot about George and Kay and Norbert and imagined her again in her khaki smock among the bright green rollers.
Later, as the ash mounted and our mouths dried, we grew quiet. At seven we hurried out to the pub.
*
Some nights later Desirée and I were walking back from the cinema. It was nearly eleven o’clock, dark. Her room lay off the main street and we had to cross a long square of gardens—there were few street-lamps, I remember only one, distant and speckled among the early leaves. Part of an iron railing still held a telephone box, the green of a cabshelter showed in the light and there were no cabs. With curtained windows on one side and on the other the dark trees and shrubbery, the pavements lay empty—shuffling with night, forlorn and fresh.
Since that Sunday I had seen her twice—on both occasions we had kissed good-night, it had become easily and passionlessly a routine. A routine breeds upon itself; again there was the danger of ‘dear old Clifford’. So, that night, leaving the cabshelter behind and facing then the long dark pavements to the end of the gardens, I took my heart from my boots and decided to kiss her there and then.
We were walking arm in arm—joined and marching forward. To bring this to a halt, to stop, would be startling: over-alert, I even imagined that such a sudden halt might bowl her over. Also—she was talking. Without emphasis she was picking to pieces a film star we had seen that evening—and then carefully and considerately reassembling her on a consoling note: ‘Still—she does as well as she can.’ It seemed rude to interrupt this. Furthermore, I was carrying on my left arm an umbrella and in my hand a small parcel.
The distance to the lighted streets grew less: it was then or never. Then, to my surprise, when I was giving up hope, the parcel came to my aid. Its loop was strung too tightly round my finger. I found myself stopping, disengaging my arm from hers, and fiddling the loop looser. And there we were—surprisingly—standing about in the dark! The phrase goes: ‘I woke up to the fact.’ So I did, it was exactly like waking up. The tension relaxed, the night around rose darkly into shape. I remember thinking: ‘Had the string been hurting all the time?’—before turning suddenly round on her and taking her shoulders and pressing down my face to hers.
She had been talking, I ate with my lips her last words. And she—she made no resisting move at all. One moment she had been talking and at the next she was being kissed. She acccepted the change as though it were no change at all. And thus for some seconds, with no word passing, we kissed.
No words passed—much else came to try us. It was an awkward, fumbling business. My hand with the parcel embraced her neck, the parcel swung against her back. The umbrella stuck out at an absurd angle—its handle pressed a tourniquet round my forearm and the ferrule was caught between the railings. Her turned-up collar edged between our lips, my free hand clutched half parcel and half the folds of her coat and little of her. But such little embarrassments were mitigated by the magic—I was kissing her! She was patient in my arms! Patient, not, indeed, responsive. But that was her way.
And that was well enough. But not for long. Passion accumulates. After that first long kiss, I suddenly struggled my left arm free and dropped the umbrella and the parcel on the pavement.
That was the end. She stiffened. All the time she must have been conscious of some safety in those impedimenta. Now smoothly she turned down her head, made a rigid little fence of her arms. There came no declamatory refusal, no dramatic ‘No!’—instead, in the same second, her cool voice said most reasonably:
‘Clifford! You’ll muss me all up.’
We hurried home.
Two days later we were to meet again—but a stroke of ill luck befell me. It had happened before, it will happen again. The spring weather was treacherous. For days it had been hot: then before midday the temperature fell abruptly, the wind rose and hurried clouds over and the rain began. I was out of town, visiting a new branch thirty miles out. And foolishly I had left off my wool kidney-band. By lunch-time the chill had got me, I was in for the old trouble. It was impossible to get home before late afternoon. I had to send Desirée a note and go to bed. I was there for a fortnight.
As soon as I was up I went round to Desirée’s store. It was midmorning, a grey day. But the garden accessories department bloomed brightly in the glaze of its own summer. Electric lights drew a fine glistening from the varnished summer-houses and dove-cots, the glossed green paint on rollers and mowers. Aluminium fertilizer-tins winked. The sacks of hoof-meal and nicotine dust themselves sat drier and more comfortably, safe on a polished floor, safe in their own weather. But Desirée was not there. However—it was eleven o’clock. I knew she would be out for her mid-morning coffee. So I waited for some time by the ornamental section, quietly enjoying the dear dry smells.
When she had not returned by half-past eleven I went over to the man in the hammocks and sunbeds and asked whether the lady would soon be back. He smiled. He was evidently pleased at this He said:
‘Back? Not likely. Not our Miss Griffiths.’
I remember a little tooth sticking coyly from his upper lip, and the erosion it had made in the lip beneath. In the false interior summer a false cloud seemed to pass, the electric light grew dark. He looked at me wittily, storing up his riddle, pleased that I had to stammer:
‘Why … what … isn’t she …?’
He sucked in his tooth with a sigh of great perseverance—then as quickly perked it out again, and never stopping, jigged it up and down with words that fell damply as rain.
‘Miss Griffiths, eh? Miss Griffiths’s gone. Gone to be engaged. Gone and got herself married by now at the rate those two’re going. Didn’t you know? You didn’t?’
A pause while he peered forward his astonishment.
‘Bless you, only a week ago it was when the young fellow comes in and goes to her seed counter there and whisks her off pronto to a social the very same a’tnoon. Next morning she comes in—Miss Easy-Come-Easy-Go—and says she’s off. Off! Quick on his pins that lad, I’ll say that much I will.’
The Stories of William Sansom Page 25