An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Bello:

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  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe new life into previously published, classic books.

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  By Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  AN IMPOSSIBLE MARRIAGE

  For Philippa

  Contents

  About the Author

  Part I Chapter One

  Part I Chapter Two

  Part I Chapter Three

  Part I Chapter Four

  Part I Chapter Five

  Part I Chapter Six

  Part I Chapter Seven

  Part I Chapter Eight

  Part I Chapter Nine

  Part I Chapter Ten

  Part I Chapter Eleven

  Part I Chapter Twelve

  Part I Chapter Thirteen

  Part I Chapter Fourteen

  Part II Chapter One

  Part II Chapter Two

  Part II Chapter Three

  Part II Chapter Four

  Part II Chapter Five

  Part II Chapter Six

  Part II Chapter Seven

  Part II Chapter Eight

  Part II Chapter Nine

  Part II Chapter Ten

  Part II Chapter Eleven

  Part II Chapter Twelve

  Part II Chapter Thiteen

  Part II Chapter Fourteen

  Part II Chapter Fifteen

  Part II Chapter Sixteen

  Part II Chapter Seventeen

  Part II Chapter Eighteen

  Part III Chapter One

  Part III Chapter Two

  Part III Chapter Three

  Part III Chapter Four

  Part III Chapter Five

  Part III Chapter Six

  Part III Chapter Seven

  Part III Chapter Eight

  Part III Chapter Nine

  Part III Chapter Ten

  Part III Chapter Eleven

  Part III Chapter Twelve

  Part IV Chapter One

  Part IV Chapter Two

  Part IV Chapter Three

  Part IV Chapter Four

  Part IV Chapter Five

  Part IV Chapter Six

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  “J’éprouvais un sentiment de fatigue profonde à sentir que tout ce temps si long non seulement avait sans une interruption été vécu, pensé, sécrété par moi, qu’il était ma vie, qu’il était moi-même, mais encore que j’avais à toute minute à le maintenir attaché à moi, qu’il me supportait, que j’étais juché à son sommet vertigineux, que je ne pouvais me mouvoir sans le déplacer avec moi.

  “La date à laquelle j’entendais le bruit de la sonnette du jardin de Combray, si distant et pourtant intérieur, était un point de repère dans cette dimension énorme que je ne savais pas avoir. J’avais le vertige de voir au-dessous de moi et en moi pourtant, comme si j’avais des lieues de hauteur, tant d’années.”

  Marcel Proust

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  (Outside The Door)

  I made up my mind that I would not see Iris Allbright again, not after so many years. I do not like looking back down the chasm of the past and seeing, in a moment of vertigo, some terror that looks like a joy, some joy crouched like a terror. It is better to keep one’s eyes on the rock-face of the present, for that is real; what is under your nose is actual, but the past is full of lies, and the only accurate memories are those we refuse to admit to our consciousness. I did not want to see Iris; we had grown out of each other twenty years ago and could have nothing more to say. It might be interesting to see if she had kept her looks, if she had worn as well as I had; but not so interesting that I was prepared to endure an afternoon of reminiscence for the possible satisfaction of a vanity.

  Also, she had had only one brief moment of real importance in my life, which was now shrivelled by memory almost to silliness. I doubted whether she herself would remember it at all. I would not see her; I had made up my mind.

  But it was not so easy. Iris was determined that I should visit her, now she had returned to Clapham, and to this end kept up a campaign of letters and telephone calls. Didn’t I want to talk over old times? If not, why not? She was longing to tell me all about her life in South America, all about her marriage, her children, her widowhood—didn’t I want to hear? She was longing to hear all about me. (‘How you’ve got on! Little Christie!’) I couldn’t be so busy as to be unable to spare just half an hour. Why not this Wednesday? Or Wednesday week? Or any day the following week? She was always at home.

  I began to feel like the unfortunate solicitor badgered with tea invitations by Armstrong, the poisoner of Hay. Knowing that if he accepted he would be murdered with a meat-paste sandwich, in constant touch with the police who had warned him what his fate was likely to be, he was nevertheless tortured by his social sense into feeling that if Armstrong were not soon arrested he would have to go to tea, to accept the sandwich, and to die. It was a hideous position for a man naturally polite and of good feeling.

  My own position was in a sense more difficult, for no one was likely to arrest Iris Allbright, and I felt the time approaching when I must either bitterly offend her or go to Clapham. In the end I went to Clapham.

  I took a certain pleasure in seeing the neighbourhood again. I was born near the Common. I had memories of crossing it on cold and frosty mornings on my way to school; of walking there on blue and dusty summer evenings in the exalted, painful insulation of first, childish love-affairs. I could see the island on the pond, cone-shaped, thick with sunny trees, on which the little boys ran naked, natural and Greek after swimming, until the borough council insisted on bathing drawers. I could see the big field by North Side, the boys and girls lounging in deck-chairs, playing ukeleles as the sun fell into ash and the new moon hardened like steel in the lavender sky; the field behind the Parade, with little low hawthorn hills, where less innocent lovers lay locked by night.

  I had not been there since the war.

  Now, on that Sunday afternoon in October, I saw it changed, my world laid waste. There were allotments in the big field; the scrawny, shabby cabbages shrivelling on their knuckly stems; tangles of weed lying over the broken earth like travellers thirst-ridden in the desert crawling towards a water-hole. Here and there were tin huts, lop-sided, peeling in the sun; and the row of high houses stretching from Sisters Avenue to Cedars Road had the shabby sadness of women too discouraged to paint their faces or get out of their dressing gowns. And there were letting-boards. I could not remember anything being to let in my day.

  The impression I had of it all was violent, too Gothic to be true—only true, perhaps, in relation to my romantic memories; but I felt depressed, a stranger there myself, and wished again that I had not yielded to Iris’s importunities.

  She was living on the second floor of a block of mansion flats, built of liver-coloured brick, and roofed in some approximation to châtea
u style. The turrets gleamed damply, like gun-metal, on the light-blue sky, and the glazed laurels flashed red and white below in the refracted light from the cars and buses. It was noisy on that corner, as I had remembered it; but far dustier—unless the dust were on the lens of my own memories. I went into the dankness of the tiled hallway, which was like the entrance to a municipal swimming baths, and in the aquarian gloom searched for her name on the Ins and Outs board, faintly hoping that by some accident I might find her proclaimed ‘Out’ and so have an excuse for going away again.

  Iris Allbright. Iris de Castro she was now. She was in.

  As I climbed the first flight of stairs I heard a gramophone playing in one of the flats, playing a tune of twenty years ago. I stopped, so certain only Iris could still preserve this record that I wondered for a moment if she were not living on the first floor after all. The world shifted in place and time; I stood against the wall, hearing that tune, seeing nothing but the downward breadth of my own pink dress. He was coming to me now across the slippery floor. I pretended not to know it. I heard Iris humming the words of the song in her small, light, penetrating voice. Every thread in my dress was sharp and separate, each with an individuality of its own. I noted the design of the weaving.

  ‘Shall we dance this?’ he said, and I looked up, and Iris was answering him. ‘No, no; I’m tired. You dance this with my friend.’ ‘I’m not dancing this one,’ I said airily; ‘I’ve laddered my stocking. I want to stop before it goes any further.’ He did not seem to hear me. Iris gave her little shrug, accompanied by the lifting of the right corner of her mouth, the sloping down of her left shoulder. She stepped into his arms and went off as if a breeze had lifted her from her feet. But this had not been her moment of importance, not this one at all.

  The world shifted again with a rush of chilly air and set me down on a stair in a dark hallway, above a green-tiled well. I went on upwards and stood before her door. Through the landing window I could see a boy and girl lolling against the railings of the Common, staring at each other. A bus came along. He gave her a kiss and ran for it. She waved after him, until there was only dust to see and the resettling of the plane trees. Then she went back to the railings and sat there, despondent. She raised her hand, let it fall to her side; it was a kind of rehearsed gesture, designed to convince her of her own sadness.

  I rang the bell, and at once heard steps along the hall. Between my ringing and the opening of the door lay the whole of my youth.

  Chapter Two

  I was out of love: it was insufferably sad. Leslie and I sat on the river’s brink, Leslie having no idea of my state of mind. He was in one of his sophisticated moods, conceited, reminiscent. ‘I couldn’t care for Mabel after that,’ he continued. ‘I pride myself on being broadminded, but it was too much. Now it’s all merely a part of my past.’

  Leslie was seventeen.

  It was a freckled, fleecy day, with small clouds like strips of cotton wool running across the bright-blue sky, and the spring wind rattling the leaves. Leslie wore brown and white shoes, with Oxford trousers of a purplish shade, which were the fashion that year.

  ‘There are sides of life I hope you will never know, Christine,’ said Leslie. His handsome nose, which was rather too long, had caught the sun. His thick, matted ginger hair had caught it also, and the heated brilliantine was giving it a green appearance. ‘Little Christine,’ he added, on one of his chest notes. He put his arm round me, then withdrew it as though I had burned him. I asked him what the matter was.

  ‘I felt I had no right to touch you with such ideas going through my mind.’

  ‘What ideas?’ But I did not really want to know. My head ached. I was tired of Richmond. I longed to get on the bus and go home, let myself in quietly without disturbing my parents and go to my own room, which would be very cool and rather dark. I should have to tell him in a letter; I had not the courage to speak.

  ‘I heard something pretty shocking the other night. I ran into Dicky Flint.’

  Leslie made a flinching gesture, probably suggested by Dicky’s name. He passed a hand over his eyes. He said in a bass whisper, ‘Do you know, there’s a brothel in Balham?’

  I was six months older than he and had read more. I said I had always imagined there might be several.

  Leslie leaped to his feet and clenched his hand upon his breast. He was breathing hard. He was not very tall.

  ‘Now what’s the matter?’

  ‘To hear such things—from your little lips!’

  He presented his profile to the light. A little taken off the nose and added to the chin, and he would have been as fascinating as he thought he was. Even so, he was better looking than the sweethearts of most of my friends, and I had been deeply flattered when he had first singled me out at the grammar-school dance, for in those days I was far from pretty, and self-conscious about my bust. I had let him kiss me in the gloom of the marquee, and afterwards we had danced in a dream on the square of grass lit by the headlights of the cars parked around it. We had fallen wildly in love. By the time my friends had made me fully aware that Leslie had an ominous mother and was commonly regarded as a little touched I was too deeply involved to break away, and certainly too proud to give my friends the satisfaction of seeing me do so. I believed Leslie could be reclaimed, that he could have sense knocked into his head. I comforted myself by thinking that he only seemed stupid because he was intellectual; he walked about at weekends with a volume of Nietzsche under his arm. But our affair had now endured nearly eight months, and I knew that Leslie was irreclaimable.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

  He looked bitter. He was busy working up a little quarrel, which he was prepared to lead into a lyric reconciliation.

  He said nothing. I picked daisies and began to make a chain. They looked charming in my green lap, and I was wearing green shoes to match, which was a fashion so unusual that other girls stared at me in envy. They were linen shoes, and I had painted them with oil-colours; the idea was taken from Little Women, and I was always afraid someone else would copy it.

  Giving up any hope of making me speak first, Leslie dropped on to one knee at my side and laid his hand on my shoulder. He stared at me gravely, with an effect very slightly astigmatic. ‘You are so small,’ he said, using his chest notes again, ‘and so pure. I don’t want the world to touch you. I don’t want to think of you as—a Mabel.’

  ‘You couldn’t,’ I said; ‘my legs are the right length.’

  Leslie said, ‘Pshaw’, a word he had read in a book and pronounced exactly. ‘Little one,’ he added. His lip drooped.

  ‘Let’s go back. Do you mind? My head aches.’

  ‘Lie in the long grass and I will stroke it away.’

  I told him I really would like to go home, and I sucked in my cheeks a little to make myself look wan. He was very disappointed, for our recent Saturdays at Richmond had been rather chilly and wet, and this was the first fine day. ‘I wanted to take you on the river.’

  This increased my determination to go home. I had once let Leslie row me before, and it was a humiliating memory. We had set out with difficulty, as he had been unable to leave the bank till the man pushed him out with a boathook. He had then zigzagged down with the tide, catching crabs frequently, and banging into other skiffs; we had been shouted at. This had gone on for about an hour. When we turned back I realised that the wind was hard against us, and that, with Leslie’s frantic tacking, we should never get back to our base before nightfall. ‘Let me row,’ I had pleaded, but he had only bulged his eyes at me sternly and informed me that he did not treat his women like that. We had been battling for about an hour, not infrequently accompanied by shrieks of derision from other boaters, when it occurred to me to ask him if he had ever rowed before. ‘Once or twice,’ said Leslie with such little breath as he had left. He looked as if he might have a stroke.

  �
�Where?’

  ‘The pond on Clapham Common.’

  When we reached the boathouse it was almost dark. The man with the boathook, who had to drag us in, was furious. Leslie was almost in tears, and I was actually so.

  ‘I couldn’t let you row me today,’ I told him now; ‘it would make my head a hundred times worse.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Leslie, ‘come home and have tea at my place. My mater’s at Auntie’s. We’ll be by ourselves.’ He gave me a soft, suggestive look. ‘My kisses will cure you,’ he murmured in my ear. His breath smelled of jam.

  It was only because I no longer loved Leslie that I assented to this compromise ending to our day. I did not want to hurt him more than I must, and he was miserable enough already. I had begun to realise for the first time that rejecting love, if not so painful as having it rejected, has a shame and an anguish of its own. ‘All right. But I won’t be able to stay long. And don’t let’s make love this evening—let’s just be nice and friendly with each other.’

  ‘Make love’ in those days did not mean what it appears to mean now. When boys and girls in their teens spoke of love-making they meant kissing, and little more.

  ‘I will cherish you,’ said Leslie with a strange, episcopal air, helping me to my feet. He picked up the daisy-chain that had dropped from my lap, looked at me meaningfully, pressed it to his lips and stowed it away in the vee of his Fair Isle pullover. He was not, I noted with some satisfaction, wearing the pair of brown-and-white shoes he had bought to go with his sporting attire, as I had condemned them and, after a long tussle of our wills, had forced him to hide away.

  When we reached the row of houses in which he lived, on the outskirts of Tooting Bec Common, the light was falling into the ruddiness of a fine evening. The wind had ceased. The red bricks glowed rose red, and over the chimneys the sky was clear as water.

  His house was the fourth in the row, a six-roomed villa with a green gate and a hedge of yellow privet.