An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  ‘I don’t get your motive,’ said Mr. Dewey firmly, ‘but I think we’ll have you out of that thing.’ And before I knew it my coat was off and draped at my back. I jumped up. Seizing it, I turned it the other way, so that the lining was concealed, and I was resting against the untainted cloth.

  ‘Now why?’ he asked.

  ‘The lining’s torn!’ I said, and stared at him.

  ‘He stared back at me. ‘Oh, Christine!’ he said. Oh, Christine, what a girl you are!’

  From that moment all was happy, and when he made me the suggestion I had feared I felt not frightened but only proud. It was a suggestion in keeping with the most golden of my romantic ideas. He was flying to Paris that weekend. He would like me to go with him. He thought we should have a wonderful time.

  I answered very politely that I should have loved it but that my father would never approve.

  ‘You mean,’ said Mr. Dewey, ‘that it would be entirely out of your line?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Yes. Well—plenty of time. And my loss.’ He smiled at me sweetly, put his hand over mine. ‘Sorry.’

  He made no further suggestions (a little to my disappointment), but on the way up to the realities of the harsh autumn day he put his arms around me in front of the lift-boy and kissed me, first on both cheeks and then on the lips.

  ‘I’m off tomorrow,’ said Mr. Dewey as we lingered in Piccadilly. ‘Then I go home on the Ile de France. And after that, God knows. Would you like a flower?’

  I hesitated. He seemed to have given me so much—perhaps too much; I was not used to drinking, and I felt I should have to move cautiously before Mr. Baynard.

  Mr. Dewey paused by an old woman with a tray of gardenias, petals like kid leather, leaves like emeralds. ‘Yes, I think you ought to have a flower.’ He said to her, ‘I’ll take a dozen.’

  A dozen, at half a crown a time.

  He bunched them up between my hands.

  ‘I can’t take these,’ I began.

  ‘You have them. Shall I walk back with you?’

  I begged him not to.

  ‘It has been very nice, Christine. Thank you very much.’ And he gave me a little, fond push to speed me on my way.

  Dazed with delight and drink, still shamed by the remembrance of the coat, numbed by the contrast between the adorable, slightly sinister paradise from which I had just come (I could not help feeling a sense of escape) and the barren earth of the office before me, I lingered in Waterloo Place, just behind the Crimea memorial, which looks from the rear like a boarding-house slattern in curl-pins and nightgown. I considered the flowers in my hands. How could I ever explain this redundancy to Mr. Baynard? What would he think? What would Mr. Fawcett think?

  For the moment I was paralysed by indecision. How could I get rid of the things? One, even now, seemed to be browning around the edges, as though scorched by an iron. I could not throw them in the gutter; it would make me too conspicuous. Was there any stranger to whom I could give them? Some beggar? Some child? There was none; and my watch said two-twenty-five.

  There was only one thing to do. Praying passers-by would merely assume that my great-grandfather had died at Inkerman, I reverently approached the memorial, inclined my head for a moment, ceremoniously knelt down, deposited the flowers on the plinth, and then ran for the office as if bloodhounds were after me.

  Mr. Baynard greeted me coldly. ‘Do you know you’re ten minutes late? The lunch-time of the Junior is one hour and no more. Oh yes, someone rang up wanting to speak to you. A Mr. Skelton. Would you please tell your friends in future that you are not allowed to take personal calls at this office?’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Is he going to ring back? ‘

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Mr. Baynard replied. He felt a sneeze coming. ‘I didn’t enquire!’ he added furiously, a second before the explosion.

  I sat down quietly, wanting to bring no more anger down upon my head, for my only aim now was to wait for my head to clear and in the meantime to try to contemplate the wonders of this day. I thought of Ned Skelton with excitement and trepidation, though with no resurgence of my first wild love. Indeed, I could hardly remember what he looked like—eight months is a long time. But the afternoon passed very slowly, and I grew tired of starting up each time the telephone rang. The day darkened down. A slant of fog fell across the sky, leaving visible only the first line of trees in St. James’s Park. Like wrought-iron they stood against its yellow fur, and not a leaf stirred.

  At a quarter-past five he telephoned again. Luckily I was alone, finishing some last-minute letters for Mr. Fawcett. Mr. Baynard, seeking comfort for his cold, had put on his hat at the stroke of the hour and was blinding his way homeward.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember me,’ said the voice I should not have recognised had I heard it without warning.

  ‘We met at the dance.’

  ‘I ran into your friend Victor playing squash last night and he told me where you worked.’ He waited, as if for some response.

  I said at last, feebly, that that was nice.

  ‘I wondered if you’d like to come for a drive with me some time. Scarcely tonight, by the look of it.’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘I’d better ring you again.’

  ‘It’s not easy for me here.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, then, give me your home address. You’re not on the phone there?’

  On hearing I was not, he said briskly that it was a pity. He usually only knew what he wanted to do at the last moment. As I gave the address to him, I felt a faint bristling of disquieted pride. Why should he speak to me in so assured, so businesslike, so unexplanatory a fashion? He reminded me a little of Mr. Baynard addressing the Junior. So I said, ‘My time’s not always my own. I don’t always know when I’ll be free.’

  ‘You’ll be free for me,’ said Ned Skelton; ‘I’ll see to it.’ And he rang off. It was all disturbing and unsatisfactory; it left me with a tension unappeased and a faintly disagreeable stirring of tadpole hopes that I did not wish to develop into full and lively frogs. I was growing up now, determined to put ungrounded fantasies behind me. Why should he seek to trouble me like this, assuming I was at his call? I had just been out with a millionaire. I had just received the fairy-tale gift of a dozen gardenias. It was a pity he didn’t know that, didn’t realise that I was the kind of young woman to whom such things happened.

  I stacked Mr. Fawcett’s letters tidily, the envelope folded upon the top of each, and took them in to be signed.

  He gave one of his great irrepressible sighs, the sigh of an animal or a baby. ‘I’ve kept you late, Miss Jackson. You’d better run along, or you’ll have trouble getting home. Oh dear, dear, dear, dear, dear!’

  I had great trouble getting home, for the fog had thickened and the bus moved at less than walking pace down Piccadilly. The street lamps streamed up it in their separated rays, and along each ray the fog spiralled and curled. The lights in the windows were dim; even the great fires in the depths of the comfortable clubs were no more than handfuls of round-cut rubies glowing without glitter. This stifling atmosphere and the aftermath of martinis gave me one of those headaches which seem to concentrate the mind to a cold common sense. I knew my millionaire would by now have forgotten me; that however important a figure he had been in my own life, I was a manikin figure in his. I knew that I did not greatly care for Ned Skelton—that he was not gentle, that he would not be kind.

  I did not care if I never heard from him again; I did not want him to write to me.

  At least, I did not want it then; but in the following weeks, as day after day went by without a word, the old unquiet awoke in me, the forgotten fever stirred and was resurrected. I saw, hallucinated, the future, and I longed for it. I was excited and unhappy.

&nbs
p; Yet when his letter did arrive I had to reply that I could not see him, not yet awhile, for my father was dead.

  One night, a week or so before Christmas, he rose out of a peculiarly troubled sleep, took Emilie by the shoulder and said, in a voice unlike his own, ‘I’m going down to the lavatory, old girl.’ She had had a busy day, and he had aroused her from a comfortable dream. She thought vaguely that he sounded odd and that it was even odder for him to wake her with such uninteresting information; but the current of the dream caught her and pulled her down into it. She awoke again a little later with the feeling that it must be nearly dawn, and she stretched out her hand to him; but he was not there. She was alert at once. She jumped out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and went, full of undefinable fears, out on to the landing. Her watch told her it was only half-past one. She had an idea that it had been one o’clock when he left her—probably she had heard the church clock strike. But half an hour was a long time for him to be absent, and as she made her way downstairs she began to tremble.

  Then she saw him coming to her along the passage, walking like a drunken man; she saw him by the street lamp that shone through our fanlight. He looked at her, said, ‘What are you doing here, old girl?’ and was transformed into a stranger by so violent a convulsion of his features that he seemed to be playing some ghastly trick to frighten her. ‘Old girl—’ he repeated, and collapsed at her feet.

  She cried out. I was sleeping too soundly to hear her. She knelt beside him, heaved his head into her lap, touched his sopping forehead, called to him, kissed him, cried to him in the anger of naked fear. She fumbled for his pulse, but could not feel it.

  All this she told me.

  But what I myself knew was the appearance of Emilie at my bedside, whispering, patting, even at this moment trying to rouse me without shock. ‘Christine, it’s your father. He’s been taken ill.’

  Then there was the nightmare of following her into the hall, now blazing with lights, and of looking for the first time upon death; of huddling into my clothes and running out into the freezing streets in search of a doctor; and of all the rest that I cannot write, as it is the routine commonplace of sudden death, the ordinary procedure, and to me the unlookable, the unthinkable.

  The damaged heart which had forced him to leave Africa and which he had tended so carefully for years could labour on with him no further—it had revolted, sprung, and stopped.

  For two days Emilie seemed frozen. She was an innocent, not very intelligent little woman, ill-fitted for a tragic role; but she had loved with an extraordinary tenacity and concentration, the whole of her being centred upon my father. She would have liked to die with him. Once or twice I came upon her sitting in some dark corner, hands folded neat as napkins in her lap. She was apparently holding her breath. Her breast did not rise or fall. Her eyes were stretched and staring. Only her colour swelled and darkened until her cheeks were like dead red roses. Then, with an explosion of breath, she would suddenly exhale. I believe she was indulging in a fantasy of killing herself by this means.

  She went quietly through the inquest, the necessary arrangements, until the day the men came to take his body away. And then she clung to the coffin and would not let go, her little chickeny arms whitening with the strain, her eyes closed, her lips stubbed into a strange, childlike protrusion. I tried to plead with her; she would not let go. She spoke once. ‘If I’ve got him they can’t take him. He shan’t go. I won’t let him go.’

  The men were in despair. The minutes went by. Emilie, lying half across the coffin, gripping it with fingers of iron, was silent. At last she opened her eyes wide, looked about her, released her hold and stood upright. She gazed as if in amazement at her arms, bruised in red lines where the edges of the wood had dug at them, and, with a murmur bearing some kind of apology, went out of the room.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The funeral was over. The blinds were up. The weather was mild for December, and the muffled sun shone all day. Emilie went quietly about the house, caring for it and for me. We both saw the pattern of our immediate lives. She suggested that I should ask my friends round again, for the usual evenings: but the days of dancing were over. We sat gossiping uneasily over the tea-cups, and the young men and girls found they had to be home earlier than usual.

  Suddenly Emilie discovered a game for us. Though I think we all found it embarrassing and silly, somehow the fascination of it caught us and would not let us go. There was guilt connected with it, too. It seemed to me that my friends were entering the house with a touch of shamed excitement, an air of stealth.

  It is the game you play with an inverted tumbler in a ring of cardboard letters. The players touch their fingertips to the glass, inviting it to answer their questions; and if they wait patiently it will begin to slide gently back and forth, spelling out words.

  Now there are two kinds of players (three, in fact, if you include cheats, which I do not): those who cannot help exerting the will, so that the glass moves through their more or less unconscious agency, and those who remain passive, so that each result is a surprise to them, satisfactorily confirming a belief in the occult. My Aunt Emilie was of the former kind, though she would never have believed it had anyone told her so, but would have denied it with genuine indignation. For in the end the glass inevitably did as she wished.

  We would sit together, she and I and perhaps three of my friends (Dicky Flint, sometimes Iris, occasionally the engaged and miserable Caroline Farmer), in the fire-lit dining-room, the reflected flames soaring and falling on the faded morris garlands, sparkling bright in the mahogany sideboard. Emilie would light a candle, so that we should be able to see the letters clearly as the fist of glass poked them out of place. Like a small, countrified, commonplace sibyl she would sit at the head of the table, her arm hieratically outstretched, her stumpy fingers patient, light as breath, upon the thick bottom of the knowing tumbler. My friends (all except Iris, who was superstitious) thought her ridiculous; but the sinister fascination of the game held them. Sometimes the glass would move by their own wills, responding to their private desires.

  ‘Who is there?’

  A tentative jerk about the circle, P X A B Y. Too many wills were moving at the same time, which, in this game, is the cause of gibberish. Dicky, with a touch of raucous nervousness: ‘Come on, come on, don’t be shy. Who’s there?’

  A long pause. Then: ‘AUDREY.’

  This was the name of Dicky’s latest girl.

  Iris, with a terrified spurt of laughter: ‘Audrey, do you really love him?’

  The glass: ‘BIT.’

  Dicky: ‘Not more than that?’

  The glass: ‘BIT DICKY IS WICKED.’

  And so on.

  But for the most part it brought Emilie peculiarly smug and uncharacteristic messages from my father. He was happy in a land of flowers. The sun was hot. There were birds.

  ‘Africa,’ she whispered, and the tears on her cheeks sparkled in the candlelight. ‘Are you in Africa, dear?’

  YES.’

  ‘Do you think about me and Christine?’

  The glass, surprisingly (perhaps moved by an unconscious revolt on my part): ‘NO.’

  ‘Oh, you do, I’m sure you do! . . . Dicky dear, you’re leaning on it too heavily. Let’s try again. Do you think about me?’

  The glass, obediently: ‘YES.’ And then, scaring me: ‘NOT NED.’

  But this, also, I must have compelled.

  These sessions seemed harmless enough at first—a consolation to poor Emilie, a slightly daring amusement for my friends and me now that the gramophone, in respect, stood silent. After a while, however, they began to worry and to sicken me. I thought of my father’s ironic disapproval, how firmly he would dissociate himself from them if he could know about them at all. And they were becoming, for Emilie, more than a consolation; they were becoming an obsession. All da
y she moved about in a dream, cleaning, cooking, bedmaking, dealing with the quiet and for once satisfactory tenants of the top floor; but with the approach of evening she flushed and sharpened, grew voluble, her eyes bright and fanatic.

  It was the evening of January 1st—a sharp, wet New Year’s Day. We were sitting round the glass—Emilie, Caroline and myself.

  The glass began straight away to plunge about with a ghastly liveliness; it was so marked that I forced myself to remember my disbelief.

  ‘Who is there?’ Emilie’s whisper hung on air like the smoke from a cigarette.

  The answer, direct, immediate, moved by her will: ‘HORACE.’

  ‘Horace! Have you a message for me?’

  It stuck, remained motionless.

  Caroline muttered in my ear (she had had no chance to speak to me before, since Emilie had opened the door to her and swept her straight into this horrible game), ‘Getting married next month. All very quiet.’

  ‘Horace ! Have you a message, dear?’

  And then it darted off again, as assuredly as before, my will behind it, though I was conscious of no pressure in my fingers.

  ‘STOP THIS DAMTOMFOOLERY.’

  Emilie cried out. She was so shocked that in releasing the glass she gave it a flick with her finger. It spun out of the circle, jerked across the table edge, bounced once on the carpet and then rebounded on to the fender, where it broke into pieces. She burst into hysterical sobbing. Caroline jumped up and switched the light on. We both stood blinking in the sudden glare, feeling distraught, ridiculous, oddly ashamed, and profoundly relieved. ‘Look here, Mrs. Jackson,’ Caroline said, ‘it was an accident. And it’s only a game. Really it is.’

  ‘I’ll never play again,’ Emilie wept, ‘never.’

  She pushed us both aside and stumbled out. We heard her moving about the kitchen getting tea; heard, through the clatter of cups and saucers, the harsh rasp of her tears. We looked at each other.