It was in one of these states of calm (which, in youth, follow the imagined solving of one of the great philosophical questions with something of that fulfilled, yet fretful, loose-ended pleasure most writers know when they have finished a book) that I went to walk on the Common one afternoon towards the end of the winter. Everything had gone well that day. We had risen contented after love, discussed the news in the paper without a trace of conflict, Ned had gone cheerfully to work, and I had had a successful morning’s shopping, by Machiavellian skill saving at least tenpence on the week’s expenditure. An accomplished housewife, all my affairs in order, my mind quiet and self-congratulatory, I walked over the hawthorn field towards the pond, hearing the crackle of the frosted grass under my feet, admiring the salty and glittering trimming of the naked twigs. The pond lay under a grey film of ice that took from the bright grey sky the bloom of steel. The trees on the sugar-loaf island were shapely in their bareness, the skeleton of summer laid plain. The thinner branches were merely salted over, like the hawthorns; but along the thicker ones lay knife-edges of snow. All was clear, hard, unmysterious. A few birds, black on the general lightness, drank from the jagged rays of water along the rim of the jetty, where the ice had thinned and crumbled.
I was fully conscious of peacefulness, which is a dangerous thing to be. Peace was lying along the still air, like the smoke from my cigarette. No one was in sight. I was able to consider eternity without being troubled, for it could only be like this, the perpetuation of nothing happening at all. Well, I thought, here I am—as if I had arrived after a long journey at a dreaded destination, only to find there was no news of any kind, good or ill, awaiting me, only a place to rest, a meal to eat, a bed to lie in and a sleep without dreams.
And I thought, Well, is this anything to be feared? Isn’t this enough?
A bird alighted on a branch, casting a little light plume of snow into my lap.
Though there seemed to be no wind at all, it must have been blowing from the north-east, for the chimes of the parish clock fell clear into the afternoon. I had half an hour in which to sit there, on my seat under the tree, by the frozen pond, and then I must go back and make ready for Ned.
Tomorrow would be the same as today, as calm, as friendly, as little to be feared. And so on, always, till youth had passed unnoticed, and middle-age (the unimaginable) also, and at last old age (which the young think they can easily imagine) had become a harmless reality, with dying at the end of it all as the only fear and the only real excitement. Enough for anybody.
I felt the tears stacking in my throat before I understood them. What was there to cry about, when there was nothing to be afraid of?
The Common awakened suddenly wth the swish of a car through the icy sludge of the Parade, the drone of an aeroplane across the sky, a drive of wind that sent the snow flying off the island trees to scamper over the ice. And it was dreadful to be alone with nobody near, to understand that for me such peace was not and would never be enough, that the body in itself would never be enough, and that I had done wrong. I had done wrong in marrying Ned, not only to myself but to him. I felt myself shaking, not with cold, but with the surrender to a fear naked as the trees were naked, now that the wind had blown. I was afraid of the effort of enduring, of the effort to make myself into what I was not (it was not for what I was that Ned loved me), of the effort to believe, now I knew that my marriage had failed, that it had not failed at all.
I had so far knapped my thoughts over the head, like Shakespeare’s eels, and kept them down. Now they were all upon me, swarming in triumph, and I was helpless. Mysteriously, without warning, by some agency I could not conceive, I had been suddenly pushed out of the shelter of childishness and had been forced to grow up. Yet, the hidden critic remarked, you have this comfort: children cannot endure, for they cannot make resolutions and abide by them. Adults can. You can, of course. And must. And, of course, will.
Chapter Four
I began to find changes not only in myself but in others. It seemed to me that the lightness of my youth had left me as a flush of light disappears from a wall when the sun goes in, leaving all things more plain, more real, more grey. If I were growing up (I thought of this process not as a forward step but as a coldness and a loss), so perhaps were my friends also, for when next I saw Dicky, meeting him by chance in St. John’s Road on a shopping day, he seemed to me to wear his old, shy, sheepish air, but with a difference. It was as though he himself had recognised it as engaging, had studied it as he might have done in the personality of a stranger, and was now using it consciously for the purpose of pleasing. ‘Which way are you going? I’ll slope along with you.’ He used his familiar schoolboy idiom, but behind it there was a smile of appreciation of its absurdity. ‘Here, give me the basket. I have to carry the wretched thing for mother, so I may as well for you.’
We walked along, dividing as the crowds parted us, coming together again. ‘How are things?’ he asked me.
They were all right, I said. I had no special news. Had he?
‘As a matter of fact, yes. I’ve changed my job.’ He told me he was now employed by a music publisher and was very content. He was doing simple clerking for the most part, but once or twice they had let him try his hand at the arrangement of popular songs. ‘You know, sometimes we get a tune, but what’s underneath it is hell. I can usually tidy it up a bit. I may even have a future.’ He looked up into the sky. ‘Fancy me with a future!’
I asked him about one or two of our acquaintances. Nothing much had happened to them. Take Plato was in his second year at Cambridge; it seemed that he was doing brilliantly. ‘That poor chap is so generous in throwing his brains around,’ Dicky said, ‘that one never imagines he can have any left. I never really know why we laughed at him; for sheer intellect he knocked spots off the rest of us.’
Privately believing myself superior, at any rate potentially, to Take Plato, I reserved my opinion.
We walked up the Rise together. It was a sparkling, cold Saturday in March. The cries of the stall-holders floated across to us from Northcote Road. In the front gardens new buds, sharp as emeralds, were prodding their way through the grime of the winter privets.
I asked about Leslie, but there was no news of him at all; no one had seen him.
‘But I expect he’s doing something terrific,’ said Dicky, referring not to reality but to Leslie’s heated imagination; ‘rum-running, or starring in Rigoletto at Covent Garden.’
He paused. ‘This will surprise you. I’ve got a new girlfriend.’ It was the phrase of our time, our milieu. No one in those days spoke of ‘a new young woman’. ‘Lady’ was an outmoded, class-conscious word, ‘woman’ a little discourteous; a ‘girl’ was any woman under fifty.
I asked him to tell me about her. Life is so odd that it is hard for us to sustain the mood of our conclusions; here and there the kingfisher hope flashes up, brilliant, leading nowhere. In these days any romance, however vicarious, gave me a sense of warmth and excitement, perhaps even a moment of irrational forward-looking. Every night in bed I told myself how lucky I really was (could I only see things straightly) to have my life settled for me while I was still so young. There were to be no more uncertainties. My physical love for Ned existed still in its continual recrudescence; the understanding of our bodies was complete. Also, I had my duty to him, and I believed I was proud of that duty. Later, when he had hauled the business back on to its feet, we should have children: and I should come quietly, without noticing the transition, into contented domestic middle-age. I knew I should be grateful, but at twenty it is easier to recognise the need for gratitude than to feel the gratitude itself. I despised my inner restlessness, and promised myself that this, too, would pass away.
Dicky, however, having been uncommonly communicative, now found himself unable to say much more on the subject of his girl. He had met her in the office. She was twenty-two. Her name was Baba, w
hich, he admitted, was a little ridiculous.
I asked him if this was serious.
He gave his stage-yokel’s look, scuffed his shoe on the pavement, smiled sideways at me. ‘You know me. I’m not much on love. But I’d like to know what you think of her.’
We stood outside the mansion flats where I lived. I said, on an impulse of freedom, for once determined to do as I pleased in harmless matters such as this, ‘Bring her to see us one night. What about Wednesday?’ I did not care what Ned thought; all that was over. I was going to have my friends after all.
‘How will He take that?’ Dicky never referred to Ned by name.
‘How will who take it?’
‘Come, come.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t be stuffy with me.’
‘I ask whoever I like,’ I said. ‘Ned likes me to have people in.’
When Ned returned that evening I told him, with the greatest authority I could muster, that I had invited guests for coffee the following week. He hardly listened. ‘Do as you please.’
We had a silent meal. I thought that, despite his air of unconcern, my assertion of will had made him angry; and I did not care if it had, though I was still a little afraid of him. But it was not that. When I came back from washing the dishes he rose from his chair, kissed my cheek and said, ‘Get your coat on. We’ll go for a walk.’
The night was sharp and clear. Thousands of stars prickled the sky above the big field. Ned walked with his arm around my waist, as he had not done for a long while.
‘Old girl,’ he said at last, ‘I’m afraid we’re sunk.’
I was frightened. ‘Oh, what has happened?’ (Though I knew. But I had believed that a decline could go on indefinitely without reaching the nadir, as acceptable, as easy to bear—once it had become familiar—as a steady progress on the horizontal planes.)
I’ve been hoping against hope,’ said Ned. ‘I didn’t want to worry you before. Especially,’ he added, with a bitterness that seemed somehow irrelevant and did not touch me, ‘in view of your well-known faith in my capacities.’ His face was sharp in the starlight. I saw his throat move. ‘We can’t go on.’
I asked him what would happen.
‘I saw my father today. I hoped he’d give me a last chance and haul me out of the mess for the time being. God knows he’s got the money. But not a bit of it. I heard his terms—with Harriet putting in any of the bits he might have left out—and I’ve had to accept them.’
We stood still in the middle of the rough field, the field where I had sat with my friends on those soft violet evenings so long ago (my father tipping his cap with a smile as he passed the forbidden circle of deck-chairs), and Ned put both his arms around me and held me to him so that I could not see his face.
He told me his father would take him back into the family business, not as a partner, but as an assistant to Finnigan. He would pay Ned a salary on which we could manage without changing our way of life, but there would be little over for luxuries. ‘Pretty, isn’t it? It’s a punishment. It’s not nice to be punished when you’re in your thirties.’ He added, in hatred, ‘Damn them!’
When we are bound to a person there must be moments when we feel, however sparse love may be between us, the clutch of unity. We are one with them; we feel their injuries in our own flesh. Sheer rage on his behalf, which was rage for myself also, made me speak before I had had time to consider my words. ‘Mr. Carker the Junior! ‘
Then I wished I had not spoken, quickly taming a leap of panic by reflecting that Ned would not know what I was talking about.
But he had read his Dickens. ‘Thanks, it only wanted that.’ Letting me go, he walked away from me. ‘A help-meet,’ he said, as I caught up with him. ‘My God, you are the perfect help-meet !’
I held his arm in both my hands. He was so unhappy that I could not bear for him to suffer further through me. I begged him to believe that I had not been jeering, and as I did so felt a visceral stirring such as I once had known in the quarrels of love, when, in all hostility, there had been the hint of joy refreshed. There was no joy in this. Nevertheless, the body, inevitably out of date, persisted in remembering.
I begged him to believe that I had not been jeering. I had thought only of the cruelty of the firm of Dombey, forgiving the defalcations of the young clerk and taking him back again, but on the condition that he should never rise from his place; that he should sit upon the same humble stool until he was grey and old, the Junior, the butt of men above him who were young enough to be his grandsons.
‘I didn’t mean it unkindly,’ I said. ‘You must know I didn’t. I’m so angry for you I could cry!’
But I knew I had done wrong again and that it was precisely these sillinesses of my youth that he found it so hard to forgive. I was moved by the memory of the night in the cinema, when I had stupidly tried to stir him to action by announcing my lack of faith; and at this moment I needed him to forgive me as I had needed him to forgive me then, but now because of his suffering, and not of mine.
I looked up into his face. He looked down at me, still bitter in his humiliation. I did not know what was about to happen to either of us. But then the bitterness faded. Weariness pacified him. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll get on. We’ll manage somehow. Anyhow, we’ve got each other.’
Chapter Five
Next day, while he was at his office winding up its last tattered affairs, I telephoned Mrs. Skelton asking her if I might come to see her. I did not wish her to tell Ned about it.
‘I never tell him anything,’ she said shortly, as if I should have known this long before.
‘Will you be alone?’
‘Nelly’s up for the day. You sound mysterious.’
I told her I was not feeling at all mysterious, only miserable.
‘It would probably be better to go to the pictures than come here, then. I’m never much good at cheering people up. And Nelly’s had to have the dog put to sleep.’
I said I would be with them at three o’clock.
When I got there I found my mother-in-law stately and lazy as usual, a magazine in her lap, a glass by her side, and Nelly still blotched from weeping.
I told Nelly how sorry I was.
‘Sorrow’s no use. He’s gone, and that’s that. You can’t keep them when they’re suffering, I suppose.’
I replied formally that obviously one could not.
‘But the damnable thing,’ Nelly said, ‘is that I’d have been happier if I’d still had him with me, even if he was in pain, even if he wanted to die. That shows you what people are.’ She added, ‘Or what I am.’
‘You’ll have another,’ Mrs. Skelton consoled her.
‘Oh yes. After a bit. I’ll have another, and get as fond of it, and go through the same kind of hell. On and on.’
’Christine says she’s miserable, too.’ Mrs. Skelton smoothed her ghostly fair hair, turned her heavy gaze upon me. ‘What a family we are!’
‘I suppose Chris is feeling upset about Ned,’ said Nelly.
‘I thought she would be.’
This understatement gave me courage. Ignoring her, I turned to her mother: and I pleaded for Ned as I have pleaded for no one else in my life. It did not matter to me that she and I had never been on terms that were more than formal. I told her I knew she had enough money to help Ned once more, to let him try once again to make a success of his own life. He had been disappointed in his one romantic desire, the passion of the restless man for soldiering, which meant not only moving in the breadth of the world but the hope of controlling himself through the discipline of controlling other men. He was trying to settle down in the one thing left to him: he wanted to be (he did not, but I was too carried away by distress to be finicky about the truth) the son she had hoped to find in him. He was a good husband (as I spoke I did not doubt it), and in future I would help him, we woul
d work together, together we would succeed. I finished, ‘Don’t make him a clerk. You can’t!’
She looked at me unblinking for a few seconds. She was troubled. Her loose body tightened in a way that made her more formidable and more human.
‘Oh, Chris,’ she said. She passed me her cigarettes. ‘Oh, my dear, I thought you wouldn’t understand.’
‘How would you feel, Nelly? ‘I cried.
‘Bad. As bad as you do. But I think I’d see sense.’ As she talked to me, she was, without knowing it, tapping the side of her leg as she had done so often when wanting the little dog to come to her, trot to her side, jump into her lap. She explained, against the background of her mother’s silence, that I didn’t know Ned as they did. He had done this sort of thing not once but, in various and more minor forms, many times. It would be idiotic to throw good money after bad. His business was beyond saving; his father was not doing too well and did not really want an addition to his own firm at all. Ned’s position would not be defined; he would simply take some of the work from Finnegan’s shoulders and make himself useful.
An Impossible Marriage Page 21