‘If things do look up, which they ought to do if we get rid of Snowden,’ Mrs. Skelton intervened, ‘and Ned still hates working for the family, he could try and get himself a job with one of the big people. He’s got the experience, and we shouldn’t tie him down.’
I did not know what to say. It all sounded sensible enough when they put it like this. I still felt it was cruel.
Nelly said kindly, ‘We both think you’ve done him a power of good. When he’s with you he’s positively civilised. We like you, Chris, you know that. But we’re not going to make fools of ourselves over our wandering boy.’
They refused to continue or to reopen this subject. I choked down my tea, said goodbye to Mrs. Skelton. ‘We’re not dragons, poor child,’ she said; ‘we’re business people. We have to be.’
Nelly went to the street door with me. We walked in file down the narrow, dusty, rickety stairs. ‘I’m sorry about your dog,’ I said again.
‘I should have had children. Then I wouldn’t be making myself silly about animals. There’s something repulsive about animal-women, I always think: they get a doggy smell. Probably I’ve got it. I suppose no one would care to tell me so.’
She patted my shoulders. ‘Things will work out all right for you. You’ll make them. You just prop him up and make him stay up.’
The twilight was sifting along the street, filling it with the promise of metropolitan night. A light drizzle had fallen, and the windows of the shops were reflected in their mandarin colours upon the roadway. There was a sweet smell in the air above the acrid smell of smoke and petrol fumes, a smell of limes or flowers or of the sea that sometimes seems to pervade a London evening. It took me back to my dreams of W.1; of the smart women in the little bars; the small, secretive restaurants glowing in the side streets; the music of a song of those days to which all the crowds had drifted in time, as they went upon their mysterious pleasure-seeking.
I said, out of a twist of anguish too great to bear in silence, ‘I’ll never forgive you, any of you!’
‘Oh, you will one day, Chris,’ Nelly said sadly, ‘when it’s all over.’
Chapter Six
In the following days I had a sense of the calm that comes from pure exhaustion; the taking of my decision to plead with Mrs. Skelton and the acting upon it had worn me out.
Ned, also, was outwardly peaceable; in a way, we were living more easily together than we had done for weeks past. The friendliness that comes of sharing a common trouble still sustained us. Though we spoke little of it directly, we fell into the habit of applying to it some of our old, half-forgotten jokes, as if our best hope of minimising misfortune was to make it all seem a little ridiculous. Yet underneath the calm the stress persisted, like a muted ground bass. It was with us, however mildly we endured it, by day and night.
I had forgotten my invitation to Dicky and his new friend until the day they were expected, and by then it was too late to put them off. I reminded Ned of the visit, and apologised.
‘Oh, let them come. I don’t mind. It might take us out of ourselves.’ He walked in his familiar perching way about the room, now and then stopping to peer at a book, a vase, a chair, as if he were one of those men (he was not) who like to criticise a wife’s housekeeping and catch her out in some petty sluttishness. ‘We’ll go to bed,’ he said; ‘we’ve got a full hour.’
It was one of Ned’s ominous habits to decide suddenly, at some inconvenient time, to make love; it usually meant a new worry. Worry may destroy for many people the idea of physical love. It was not so with Ned, for whom the latter was an unfailing anodyne.
Afterwards he seemed lively again, and it was not until our visitors were due to arrive that he said suddenly, on a bark of furious laughter, ‘You can’t get upsides with them, you know. You really can’t. They defeat the imagination.’
‘Who do?’
‘My family. I saw the old man today. The latest is to tell me I can’t use the car any more. Mother has decided she wants it herself at the weekends.’
The bell rang.
‘Here they are,’ said Ned. ‘Let ‘em flow in in their hundreds.’
Dicky’s girl was just the kind I imagined he would choose. She was at the same time slender and sturdy, her back rather long, her breasts small and high. She was quiet, pale-faced, dark-haired, and she wore glasses. Her best feature was a large, beautifully-shaped, somewhat derisive mouth. When she laughed, which she did often and silently, she showed teeth as white and fine as Dicky’s own. She appeared to be shy—which was not unnatural, I felt, since, having once introduced her, Dicky behaved as if she were no responsibility of his; as if, perhaps, she had followed him through the door by accident. Luckily, her shyness gave Ned a desire to please. He was more amiable than I had seen him towards any acquaintance of my own, and the evening I had dreaded showed signs of becoming a pleasant one. Dicky’s usual assumption of ease became a reality. After I had served coffee, Ned produced a bottle of gin.
‘Only a little,’ said the girl Baba, speaking for the first time of her own accord and not in response to the usual sociable questioning. ‘I readily become disgusting.’
She said this with a quaint, vicarage air that made Ned laugh aloud.
I was pleased to see him so taken out of himself. Tonight he was as easy as he had been in carefree days, in the company of his own friends; and it comforted me to see him enjoying the company of mine. The veiled, amused look that had once attracted me had come to him again; he looked at the girl as if he were surveying her from a vantage point, through opera glasses, and I thought it would be fun to discuss her when the evening was over.
‘Oh, but I do. Dicky will tell you.’ Folding her hands in her grey silk lap, so that they were like virtuous hands in some Flemish painting, she flashed a tender, ironic smile in my direction.
Dicky smiled, shifted his feet, said nothing. It was as though, having brought her to us, he had retired completely, had made her over into our charge.
She watched abstractedly as Ned gave her the volume of drink he would have poured for himself. ‘Oh dear, that’s far too much!’
‘I can always gauge a girl’s requirements,’ he said. His eyes met hers. She laughed. ‘Well,’ she murmured, ‘on your head be it.’
I followed him out into the kitchen on a pretence of fetching more lime-juice. ‘You’ll make that poor girl drunk ! What on earth are you doing?’
‘My foot,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me. I know that type.’
As I went by him, he caught my waist and kissed me.
But Baba would not permit her glass to be refilled. While Ned drank a good deal (growing rosier, his smile steadier) and Dicky far more than he was used to, she entertained us with quiet and funny little stories of life at the office. She had a demure wit and the gift of presenting a very clear picture of herself while speaking, ostensibly, only of others. Dicky gazed at her in lazy pleasure. He did not mean to talk much, for, though he would make a clown of himself within the limits of his own choosing, he did not really like to look a fool; and whenever he had been drinking, which was rare, took care that drink should not betray him. He had gone to sit in a chair by the window, a little apart from us. He seemed proud of his girl, proud that we—especially Ned—were entertained by her.
She thanked us at last for a delightful evening. She was no longer playing comedy; she was shy again, mouse-like, deferential.
‘Will you get home all right?’ Ned asked her. ‘Do you live far?’
‘I’ll be seeing her home,’ Dicky said with a fond smile. He rose rather cautiously, as if he had pins and needles or was testing the floor to see if it would bear him. ‘The trouble is, whether I’ll get a tram back afterwards.’
‘Oh, they run awfully late,’ the girl assured him. She was obviously unaccustomed to dissuading young men from their full duties as escorts.
; She took my hand and held it. ‘I do wish you’d both come over and see me one evening. Will you? I’ve got a little flat of my own—quite poky, but not all repulsive.’
‘I suppose there’s no one to sit up for you with cocoa as there was for me,’ I said. ‘I envy you.’
‘Do you know,’ she said, her eyes wide-open behind her glasses, ‘I simply worship cocoa. Not many people do.’
Dicky began to hustle her into her coat. Despite his pride in her, he did not want to walk home by himself from the outer suburbs of London.
When they had gone Ned’s spirits fell again. ‘Oh Lord, I’m tired.’ I asked him, with the triumph of a successful hostess, whether he did not think the evening had gone well.
His face lit with a reminiscent flicker. ‘Not bad. But Baba may prove a bit much for poor old Dicky.’
These adjectives, belittling though they were, at least held a friendliness I had never yet heard him display in speaking of anyone whom I knew; somehow they made our future together seem a little brighter. I had struck this small blow for liberty; he had reconciled himself, even in this trifling way, to accepting my own likings. I believed we might come to terms with each other; be generous with each other, perhaps, through tolerance and tenderness; cease to take life so hardly.
It would be better if we took it as easily as possible, for I knew that in itself it would, for an unguessable period, be hard as stone.
Chapter Seven
We had spent so much anger and distress beforehand over Ned’s return to the commercial roof of his father that when the time actually came for it it had not seemed so bad. He did not talk much about these new days at the office and I did not question him. One of the danger signals in any intimate relationship is a sudden inexplicable inability or disinclination to ask questions: happy lovers do not watch their words. Whether Ned realised the distance that had grown between us I do not know, for certainly it was masked by amity and a kind of outward ease; but I realised it myself and recognised every symptom of it. Yet life seemed to hang in suspension, like a cloud that will not discharge its weight of rain; and this suspension itself was a comfort to be clung to. I think I had no conscious frets at that time but the fret that money was so tight. It seemed impossible even to replace a cracked cup without debating the cost.
I heard nothing more of Dicky till he telephoned me one day early in May to tell me (among other things that seemed to him more interesting) that his affair with Baba was now a thing of the past. When I asked what had happened he replied, ‘Oh, we just drifted. You know what I am.’
With this I had to be content. Anyway, it was hardly likely to stay long in my mind, for I had a fresh worry of my own and a grave one. I had been too anxious about Ned to notice the passing of the days, and did not realise what had happened till I was unwittingly awakened to it by Caroline.
She had called to see me one morning on her way to her mother’s. I thought I had never seen her so jaunty, so smart, or looking more strained. ‘I could do with coffee,’ she said, answering my question, ‘hot and strong and black.’ She threw herself down on the sofa, head on a cushion, her legs dangling over the arm. ‘Darling, doom has descended. I really must tell somebody, and you’ve had a line on the affair up to date.’ Lighting a cigarette, she blew some steady, handsome rings. ‘My dear husband,’ she said, has received a grave blow to his self-esteem. I couldn’t stand the “barren woman” charges morning, noon and night, so I took an outside chance and said I’d see a doctor if he would. “What rot,” he says loftily. “You go. I’m damned if I will.” Whereupon I say I’ll only go if he does. Row, row, row, row. You can’t imagine what it was like. In the end we both went—great strength of mind on my part, darling, you simply can’t imagine.’
She heaved herself up from the sofa and put herself in a hard chair. ‘Better for my posture, dear. And, anyway, I can’t sit still for five minutes. Coffee first, and I’ll tell you the wonderful result.’
She made me wait. In those days it was never easy for her to talk; but at last I learned what had happened. Caroline was perfectly able to conceive and to bear children; her husband was sterile.
At first he had refused to believe it. He had shouted at the doctor, had tried to impress him with accounts of his potency (‘which nobody could deny,’ Caroline put in wearily), had jeered in shock and bewilderment on hearing that this was often entirely irrelevant. He was going to get another opinion; he wasn’t going to believe what the first medico tried to tell him. ‘He was so rude, darling, and I was so ashamed. Because you know how I hate scenes of any sort.’
He had sought another opinion, and another one, both for Caroline and himself. The findings were the same.
‘And now,’ she said, there comes the maddest complication of all. He can’t beget little ones, so he refuses to try. He absolutely refuses. Honestly, I think I’ll go mad. We live just like brother and sister.’ She turned her head away. ‘Which is hard for me. As I told you, in my crude way, I was distinctly Pro.’ She added, ‘A sickening sort of joke, isn’t it? Of course, it will stop him ticking off the lunar months, which is one good thing.’
It was at this moment that my own fear struck me, struck me with such force that for a minute or so I was unable to speak. I could not care for Caroline, who had exposed herself to me as she could have done to no one else; could not pity her for this new irony of life or for the stoicism that had set the jauntiness of middle-age upon a face still so childishly formed, a brow still bare and round as a baby’s.
I managed at last to tell her how sorry I was. My words sounded stilted. Yet stiltedness of response was pleasing to Caroline, who could never endure compassion to be emotionally expressed.
‘Oh, well,’ she said. She stood up. ‘So now you know. And now I have to go and see Mummy, and be bright and breezy and never breathe a word. Because to Mummy all this would be quite incomprehensible. She’s so simple, poor lamb. She’d never understand.’
I went downstairs with her to the door. She looked across the common, green with the spring. Some children were playing on the railings, hanging upside-down, exposing ragged knickers and wishbone thighs. The ice-cream man, with his harlequin cart, was shouting his wares. A little solitary maybush on the edge of the big field had broken out all over in freckled and honey-scented flower.
‘We did have good times, didn’t we?’ Caroline said wistfully. ‘Do you remember our first high heels? We were so proud of them. Oh dear, here’s my bus.’
When she had gone I stayed by the gate, looking at nothing at all, conscious only of the irrelevance of the steady sun upon my face. My calculations could be wrong —I had made even an adding machine go wrong, so I might easily be mistaken with mental arithmetic. But I knew I was not.
I waited for Ned to notice. He noticed nothing; he was insulated from interest in all about him by the feverish determination to work hard, to make his parents sorry they had misjudged him. So at last I had to tell him myself.
I timed it badly. I had been trying to amuse him by an account of Dicky’s break with Baba, and how characteristically he had taken it. He had listened abstractedly, smiling politely now and then as if switching a light on and off. Without my volition the words came, rapid and fearful. He stared at me, the mosaics of his eyes drained of expression. Then he flushed, the colour plunging down in spearheads from his cheekbones to his throat.
He said, ‘You’ve damned well done that, when you know how rotten things are!’
He believed I had deliberately cheated him: I could not convince him that I had not, that something had simply gone wrong. He threw up at me the times when I asked him to let us have children. Even in my despair I was astonished to learn how accurately he seemed to remember everything I had ever said to him.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ said Ned. ‘You used to lie like the devil, but I thought I’d broken you of it.’
Do yo
u think I’m happy about this? ’ I demanded.
‘Of course you are. And you don’t care who suffers.’
‘We’ll manage somehow.’
‘Parrot-talk.’ (It was his mother’s phrase.) ‘How?’
‘People do.’
‘How you could do this to me, I don’t know! You’re bone-selfish. You never give a damn for anyone but yourself.’
I wanted to speak to him, and I wanted him to listen. I knew a sickness of anger and disappointment and pride. When I spoke I wanted my voice to sound strange to him, so that it would enforce his attention. I waited. Ned was loping up and down the room with a stride which, I thought, began to falter a little as the silence went on.
‘Well?’ he said at last.
I said, ‘You’re making it seem like a bad dream. I’m expecting a child, and it’s yours.’
‘Who else’s would it be?’ He could not resist the automatic gibe.
I told him to be quiet, and I heard the strange voice, the voice that was not mine, the voice that silenced him.
‘I’m expecting a child, which is a dreadful shock to me, knowing how you feel, and you’re behaving like a brute.’ He should be ashamed of himself, I said. How dared he say I had cheated him?
‘Well, it seems damned queer.’
I asked him again how he had dared to call me a cheat, a liar, to accuse me of thinking of no one but myself. I asked him—and it did not sound like weakness—to remember how much younger I was than he; and to treat me with decent kindness.
He got up and went out of the room.
I picked up a magazine. I was not going to cry. I was going to read quietly till he came back again.
He did come back. He told me he was sorry for what he had said—he had not known what he was saying. We should, of course, manage somehow, as I had said; people did. Harriet would like a grandchild—it might soften her a bit. I was to go to the doctor, just to make quite sure, and take care of myself and put my feet up. He fell into a kind of stricken tenderness, smoothing me, patting me. Then he had an inspiration: he told me he had only spoken cruelly out of concern for me. If anything happened to me he could not bear it. That was the truth of the matter, if only I would see it: he was afraid I would die in childbirth. ‘Because I love you, Chris; you’ve got to understand that.’
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