‘What’s the good of asking her? She’ll only say she can’t leave the boy. I’ve asked her again and again to get a reliable woman in.’
‘Boy doesn’t need you as he does,’ said Harris, ducking his head sideways in Ned’s direction. ‘Come on, Chris; we’ll all go together and have a high old time.’
Ned looked at me. I knew he had only brought Harris here in the hope that an outsider’s persuasions might prove more effective than his own, though why he should have hoped for any such thing I did not know. ‘Take the baby over to Emilie, why don’t you?’
‘I can’t, not suddenly, like that.’
‘Damn her, chasing over the other side of the Common. God knows what she wanted to do it for. She was comfortable enough here. Now one can’t even get her on the phone.’
As I changed the dishes I saw the two men through the open door of the dining-room, silent together, nothing to say to each other. They looked forlorn.
But Ned had made his effect through the medium of Jack Harris, though it was not one he could have anticipated. For some reason I cannot explain, he looked to me far lonelier, far more pitiable in the company of a friend than he ever looked to me when he was by himself. The shine had gone from his hair, from the flesh of his cheeks. He seemed older than he was.
I made up my mind that when he came back from Essex I would steel myself once again to accept this marriage and to make it endure. I would honestly try. I had, as his mother had said, a duty to him. I thought of the countless people who had forced out of a duty a tolerable way of living, who had even been reasonably happy. It was a starry night, the stars swarming like silver bees over the black hive of the sky. I thought painstakingly of other worlds. With so many people, uncountable as the minutes in eternity, living out so many unguessable tragedies and comedies, it did not seem to me that my life was of the slightest importance to anyone but myself; and what, in these immensities of so many suns and moons, could I possibly matter? I decided that I did not matter at all; and though the thought gave me courage, it also made me cry a little.
I shall never forget that weekend. It is one thing to screw one’s courage to the sticking-place, quite another to see that it stays there. It is the metaphor of the lutanist; the strings are stretched till the wooden peg holds them at the proper tension, ready to sing. But lute-strings may wither or snap. It was an intolerable strain and soreness, trying to keep my resolution in tune. I tried not to think any more of Ned, to think only of the baby and of my delight in him. This, I said to myself, should be enough for anyone to live by: a beloved child.
Yet there are many natures for whom one kind of love, no matter how strong, is not sufficient. Feed to repletion one mouth of the spirit, another mouth starves. I did not know, until I was much older, that it was so with myself; and before I recognised it and accepted it I suffered from a rotting sense of guilt, often hating myself because I believed I should never have borne children at all, since I could not give myself to them utterly.
That weekend I tried to force my own nature into a shape I was afraid it would never take; but then, I meant to do impossibilities. I was determined. On the Sunday night I hardly slept. I did not sleep till the early sun was flickering its water-shadows on the window-pane. When I woke again I felt calm and refreshed, ready to tell Ned that all was well with us, that we would begin again, patient of each other, and be as happy as other couples were.
I did not know what time to expect him. He had not told me. Since he did not come in the morning, I supposed he had gone straight to the office and would be home about half-past six, as usual. I put on one of my new dresses, made myself as pleasing as I could, although—as on my wedding-day—the glass would not perform a miracle and left me, as before, with lines of strain under my eyes. It was disappointing. I had wanted him to admire and love me as never before, so that the force of his love should be sufficient for the two of us.
He was late; the meal I had prepared spoiled in the oven. I took it out, and found some cold meat that we might have instead. Nine o’clock, and ten. I knew well enough that he would not return at all that night, but until past midnight refused to let myself believe it.
He did not come next morning, nor the next night. Early on Wednesday I put Mark in charge of the daily woman and went across the Common to see Emilie.
At once she saw that something was wrong. ‘What’s the matter? You look ill.’
I told her I was not ill, but that I was bringing the baby to her that day and that she must take us both in. I told her of the failure of my marriage, of my sudden decision to retrieve it, of Ned’s non-appearance, and my final decision, at all costs, to break free, whether he would divorce me or not.
‘You were married in church,’ said Emilie, bursting into tears, ‘in church.’
I told her the plans I had made, how I had included her in them. I had made her leave the flat where we lived because I wanted a place of refuge if the need should arise. And it had arisen. I was going straight home to get a taxi. I would bring the cot and the perambulator, the minimum of clothing for Mark and myself. I would send for the rest later.
‘How can I do it?’ Emilie moaned. ‘I wish your father was here.’
I said that I did, too, though I did not think he would have been of much help.
‘He would have been fifty-four today if he had lived,’ she cried out, putting her handkerchief to her mouth. But even she, in this moment of crisis, could not linger too long upon his anniversary. ‘Oh, Chris, you know you can’t come here!’
I said, ‘There’s no one else to help me. And I’m coming.’ I kissed her; she looked at me, her lips trembling, her eyes distraught. Then she seemed to grow quite calm, mistress of herself. ‘I’ll try to help you,’ she said. ‘I’ll try. I shall always do my best.’
On the way home I had no thought for anything but practical details. Could I get the baby’s clothes, his napkins, his bottles, his various tins, jars, powders and brushes, into one case? Would the driver let me put the perambulator on the roof of the cab? Should I need more for myself than one extra dress, a change of underwear and a nightgown?
I found myself pushing open the gate. The daily woman, in her hat and coat, was standing under the tree. ‘Mr. Skelton said it would be all right for me to go now. He’s just come in.’
I ran up the stairs and into the flat. He was standing with his back to the empty grate, his hands in his pockets, his bird-like head thrown back as if, for twopence, he would break into a whistle. But he was as pale as the wall behind him, and when he saw me did not budge from his position.
He said, ‘All right. You can have it your own way.’ At first I did not understand. I even asked him what he meant.
‘I’ll let you go.’ His eyes evaded mine. ‘I’ll do whatever you want, send you hotel bills—God, I don’t know. . . . What is it one does? You must find out what they want me to do.’
Then he did look at me, and I saw in his face a contempt that was not for me but for himself; he was utterly unnerved by it.
‘But what has happened?’ I cried out to him. For a moment I felt a violent desire to hold him, to tell him he need not give way to me, that we would, after all, make a new beginning.
He said, ‘What the devil can that matter to you? You’ve got your own way. Take it.’
He told me he was going now, that I should find him at Maddox Street if I wanted anything. He broke away suddenly and went into the bedroom. I heard him moving about the room. It could not have been five minutes before he came out again, carrying the suitcase he had taken to Frinton and had not yet unpacked, and a smaller one borrowed from me. ‘You’ll get this back some time.’
I said, ‘Ned, surely we shall have to talk!’
‘We’ve talked quite enough. I’ll arrange about money.’ I told him I had planned to go back to work.
He coloured. It was as th
ough he suddenly realised that I had accepted what was happening; yet I knew he had meant me to accept it. ‘That’s your affair,’ he said after a moment. He looked as if he were about to say something else. He took a step towards me. I believed he would touch or kiss me.
Then he said violently, ‘Yes, all right. Go on! Look! Stare away!’
His eyes were faceted with tears. Unblinking, he let them spread across the pupils before he smeared them away.
‘I wasn’t staring,’ I said. I looked down. I saw the pattern of the carpet, the zigzag of dark blue upon fawn, in the discreet and nervous taste of our day.
He had stepped past me out of the room. I heard the door close. I went to the window. He walked steadily down the path. I thought he would go and look at the baby, but he did not. He did not even glance in the direction of the tree under which Mark slept in the dark-green lacing of shadow. Unable to watch him any more, I held my hands to my eyes and felt the trembling in my wrists. When I looked again the road was bare of him. A bus swept by, stirring up the white dust, whipping a newspaper along with it and then letting it go, to flutter backwards and flatten itself upon a lamp-post.
I am free, I said to myself, but could not believe it. I longed for Mark to cry, so that I could bring him in and care for him. I wanted his company. I wanted to hold him. I wanted something to do. For at the moment the horror of sheer emptiness, the horror of finality, was upon me, and it was too great for me to meet.
Down the abyss of time this moment sticks out, a hook upon air. I look at it and cling to the cliff face, till the giddiness passes. For around it is nothing, no cloud, no rim of distant sea. It is a hook upon whiteness without shadow, a cruel shape, infinitely lonely, infinitely sad.
Chapter Six
(The Door Opens)
Silent, smiling, Iris stretched out her arms and, as if we were children, hugged me. She stepped back. Clasping her hands under her chin, she stared at me. ‘Christie! After all this time!’ She dropped her arms. ‘Well, well,’ she said, ‘come in. We can’t stand in the hall for ever.’
It had seemed to me, in that first moment, that she had not changed at all; that she had admitted me not into the present but into yet another cell of the past. She was still slender. She had still the same air of bunched and tidy prettiness, of cultivated, self-conscious mischief. For a second I felt something like my old dread of her, felt she had still the power to shadow and to deprive me. But then, as we came into the high, clear room, I saw that she had changed beyond my imagination, for she had lost her light. There was nothing now to shine through the shell of her beauty. She was lustreless. Her dress was the kind of dress she had worn in her girlhood, dainty, pale, a little over-elaborate. Out of some kind of vanity, perhaps, she wore no make-up at all; it would have helped her, but she had rejected it. I remembered my own strange vanity of more than twenty years ago, when I had stripped myself of ornament in the hope of looking stately and distinguished at the sports club dance.
‘Christie, you make me quite sick! You haven’t altered one little bit!’
‘Nor have you,’ I said.
‘Darling, I look a horse! You know I do!’ She embraced me again. Her flesh had still the same flowery and delightful odour, reminding one with an association of sight rather than smell, of the crystallised violet and rose petals that had always adorned our birthday cakes. ‘How do you like my flat? A come-down, dear, after foreign glories, but it suits me.’
She had told me already in her letters the outline of her life. She had borne four children, of which two had not survived; the two living, a boy of twenty, a girl two years younger, were married, and had settled in America. Her husband had died in 1950. Iris, who had looked forward to a very comfortable widowhood, discovered that they had been living on capital for years and that the money remaining to her after payment of death duties and some astonishing debts was just sufficient to provide her with an income of ten pounds a week.
I looked about the room. It was so much the old Iris, even more like the girl of the past than the woman now displaying it to me, that I wanted to cry. This was the same elegant, pastel clutter, almost, but not quite, spotless; everything was frilled that could be frilled; and on the divan, so much a survival of the nineteen-twenties that I could not imagine where she had found it, was a brand-new doll, a toy with long soft legs protruding like tentacles from the crinoline rucked about its waist, and with hard, dead azure-lidded eyes painted on pink canvas, so that the whites were pink also.
Seeing me look at it, she snatched it up and held it to her cheek. ‘You’re my new baby, aren’t you, pet? Say hullo to Aunt Christie and ask her to write in your autograph book.’
I had taken this for whimsicality, and was surprised when Iris produced from a drawer a silk-covered book filled with cachou-coloured leaves, on the front of which was written the doll’s name. ‘All my friends have to write in it. You too, Christie. Do it now, because I might forget, once we start talking. She’s the only baby I’ve got left,’ she added, and clenched her teeth in a smile, as if to hold back a sorrow she had long since rejected but of which she needed me to be aware. Aren’t you, my love?’ she said softly to the doll, touching its cheek to her own. She gave me the book. ‘Write her a pretty message.’
When this ceremony was disposed of, Iris brought in tea. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘we’ll really get down to old times. How you’ve got on, haven’t you? Right over the other side of the world I’ve been thinking, “That’s my friend, doing all that. That’s my own Christie.”’ She gave a great sigh. ‘Do you know, the very week poor Mummie died she sent me a cutting about you from a newspaper?’
Iris bounced up from her chair and came to sit beside me on the divan. She looked at me thoughtfully, with a trace of her old, flirtatious air. ‘And very smart, Christie, too. Would I look nice in that hat, or like a hag?’
‘Iris,’ I said, remembering another incident, ‘we aren’t even going to experiment.’
Probably she also remembered, for she laughed, and pushed at my shoulder. She asked me about my husband. Was I happy? I looked as if I was.
As I replied it seemed to me that the sun had flashed up all around the house, and that the present was with it, there in those ragged fields, lying along the intersecting paths and over the leaves like light itself; and I longed to escape to it, away from this room stifling with memory, close with the shames, the shifts, the hopes, the guilt, of my youth.
‘I’m glad,’ Iris said, ‘I’m glad you are. You always deserved things, Christie. Do you ever see anything of the old people? The people we used to know?’
I told her Dicky was dead, that he had been killed in North Africa; that I had not seen Caroline since her husband left her, but that I knew she had married again and left London.
‘Oh, I’ve seen Caroline,’ said Iris. ‘I ran into her the other week. We had a terrific heart-to-heart. What about the others?’
I had never heard what had happened to Take Plato. I had never, as he had prophesied, set eyes on Leslie again.
‘Poor Leslie!’ Iris cried on an upward rip of mirth, ‘He was such a mutt! Honestly, darling, I never knew how you could.’
I reminded her that in those days my area of choice had been restricted.
‘Oh, nonsense! You could have had anyone, just anyone!’
She asked me about my son. I told her proudly, as pleased to speak his name as, in my youth, I had been pleased to speak Ned’s, that he had just left Cambridge, triumphantly, with a First.
‘A what?’ Iris stared. She burst out laughing. ‘Oh, darling, I thought you said a thirst. I am ridiculous! What is a First? You can’t expect me to know these things. Is he very handsome?’
No, I replied, but his colouring was bright and his face lively.
‘Is he like Ned?’
‘Sometimes. Not so much now as he used to be.’
; Iris withdrew from me along the divan and tucked her legs under her. Her eyes glittered. I felt uneasy without knowing why; then recalled that as a girl she had sat like this, looked like this, when anticipating the joy of imparting disagreeable news. Yet, I thought, she could have no news for me, not now, with a score of years lying between us. She could only ask questions. Tell me, does he ever see Neddy?’
No, I told her, not these days. Ned had taken the boy out occasionally while he was still at school, but always as if he were in a hurry, with a train to catch, more important matters waiting for him. Since he had married again (at last, barely two years ago) he had not expressed a wish to see Mark at all. ‘Does G—adore Mark?’ Iris enquired, characteristically referring to my husband, whom, of course, she did not know, by a diminutive nobody had ever used. ‘I’m sure he does. Oh, you are lucky, Christie! You always were.’
I said nothing.
‘Well’—she amended her statement—‘perhaps you weren’t, right at the beginning. But Neddy did let you go in the end, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I never knew why.’
I had never known, had never guessed what had made him change his mind that weekend in July. And I had been too grateful to wonder. But now, betrayed by my own thoughts into offering Iris half a confidence, I was suddenly on guard. For her lips were tight upon a secret smile; she could hardly contain herself.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter. It was all so long ago.’
‘Of course, I only met him that once,’ she said suddenly, as if excusing herself for something.
I stared at her.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Iris, opening her eyes wide in a simple look.
I reminded her of the evening at the restaurant. When you were in the cabaret. You came and talked to us.’
She looked thoughtfully down. ‘Cabaret.’ Then she looked up again, smiling. ‘Oh yes, of course. I’d clean forgotten.’
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