An Impossible Marriage
Page 31
She was telling the truth. Of the incident that had for so long directed my life, driven my inclination awry, thrust me into a misery I need never have known, she did, in fact, remember nothing at all. I should have liked to remind her of it still further; yet even now I was ashamed that she should recall a petty triumph over me.
‘It was that silly song about the tarts!’ she exclaimed radiantly. ‘I had that awful frock—my dear, never shall I forget it! It made me look spavined.’ Reminiscently she hummed a tune; yet even as she did so her face changed, grew shuttered and secret. She stretched out her arms over her head, clasped her hands and smiled at me steadily.
I wanted to get up and go away, out into the sunshine and into my own now fortunate life. She was forcing me to look behind, to look down the vertiginous fall of the years.
‘I could tell you, if you really wanted to know,’ she said.
I asked her what she could tell me.
‘Oh, why. The whys and wherefores.’ She kept the same posture, taut, anticipatory.
Iris? It could not be. He had not even liked her. Yet the thought that it might, after all, have been Iris to whom he had turned made me feel sick and young and betrayed. But she had said, ‘I only met him that once’, which would have been a stupid lie if she were going to confess to such a betrayal. And then I remembered that at the time she had not even been in England. She had married by then; she had been far away over the other side of the world. In any case, what did it matter?
Her hands parted. She gave a rushing sigh. Slowly she brought her arms down to shoulder level, then let them fall and clasped her hands in her lap. With the light of her beauty faded, she still had beauty’s audacious and meaningless graces.
As I did not speak she said, ‘I always admired your Neddy—and you, too, of course. Even though you did hide him away, I tell you, he made a deep impression on me.’ She grew solemn. She raised her face so that I could search it, lifted her hand with a faltering gesture, as if she were acting the part of a blind girl, and touched my cheek. ‘I don’t know if I ought to tell you. As you say, it is so long ago.’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘out with it. You always told me things in the end.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d mind,’ said Iris, ‘not now.’
I could not speak. Outside this house, outside this room, I should be free as a sleeper awakening; but I could not endure the way she had trapped me in this withered dream.
‘Only I do happen to know why Neddy let you go in the end. I was told. Recently. I won’t tell you if you don’t want to know.’
‘Of course I want to know! ’ I cried.
A faint smile moved along her mouth, lingered at one corner.
‘It was Caroline.’
If Iris had hoped to be rewarded by my entire amazement she must have been satisfied. I could do nothing but repeat the name.
Having told her secret and been placated by the result of it, Iris suddenly relaxed. The girlishness left her. She looked a tired, bored woman, who had had nearly but not quite what she desired; whom life had treated fairly enough, but with a touch of stinginess.
‘Oh, nobody else could get anything out of her, but I could. She always told me things in the end. That’s why she started avoiding me—because she couldn’t help pouring things out. Besides, she’s still got a guilty conscience about it. “Oh, don’t be so silly,” I said; “it’s all dead as Queen Anne. And, anyway, you did Christie a good turn.” ’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘come on. Tell me all about it.’
And she told me the confidence Caroline, only a week ago, out of some ancient compulsion, had disclosed to her. It seemed that Ned, on his way back to me from Essex, had met Caroline by chance and on an impulse had gone to her flat. (He had always liked her; she was the only one of my friends whom he had ever admired.) Miserable, desperate, he had told her that I was tired of him, no longer in love with him, that I wanted him to divorce me. Caroline, equally wretched and lonely, finding physical deprivation more and more intolerable, had tried to comfort him. They had sat drinking till late; till it seemed far too late for Ned to go. That night, not out of love but out of the ache of solitude, they had slept together, and the next night also.
‘So there it is,’ said Iris in rather a loud voice. She looked a little scared. ‘Caroline said she couldn’t have done it if she hadn’t known you didn’t want him. She said she never cared for him and she never saw him again after that. But afterwards she couldn’t look you in the face. Because she loved you,’ Iris added in something like a tone of anger. ‘She did, you know; she loved you far better than she loved me.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
A bird had alighted on the window-sill. I could just see the quilled and silken head bobbing over the rim of the glass. Over the common the clouds floated like fingerings of cotton wool across a strong blue sky.
‘Still,’ Iris said, ‘I still don’t see why he need have changed his mind. He could just have kept quiet.’
She did not understand him; but I did. I knew that he could not have kept quiet. His fidelity to me had given him, in his own mind, a moral advantage. He housed me, clothed me, fed me, was faithful to me—he was not going to parade a concocted guilt for my benefit. But the moment he had, on a violent impulse, lost this advantage, he could not hold me. He had judged himself harshly, contemptuously, and found himself guilty.
‘I suppose he could,’ I said.
Iris murmured that she hoped I was not upset.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not upset at all.’ And it was true, for in a moment strength had returned to me. Even in that room I felt the present like a wall at my back and all about me. Even as I looked at Iris, she began to turn into a stranger; as I, as a girl, was now a stranger to myself. She had been talking to that girl who had escaped her, who was no longer there.
We talked for a while of other things.
‘It has been lovely to see you,’ Iris said, rather fretfully, as I rose to go. Her eyes filled. ‘Don’t let’s lose sight of each other. Old friends shouldn’t, should they? I know you’re busy, Christie, and have thousands of people to see, but promise me you’ll come back.’ She picked up her doll and talked to it. ‘She’ll have to come back to see you, won’t she, my pet? You never let people get away, do you? Not when they’ve signed their names in your little book.’ She kissed me, holding her lips open against my cheek, leaving it a little moist. Now the children are gone, everything’s so empty. You mustn’t desert me. Not my best friend.’
I did not wait for a bus outside the mansions, for I thought she would watch me from the window, as I had watched the boy and girl saying goodbye. I told myself I would indeed visit her again, since she had so little and I so much—but I knew I should not. It was not that I was any longer afraid of her, or that I was selfish enough to care nothing for her at all. What I did fear was the yesterday she bore with her as inseparably as her own shadow. All the past is our enriching. But we must live in the present if we are to remain real; not to ourselves, but to other people about us. It profits nobody whom we have injured simply to be sorry for them, to acknowledge our guilt and suffer for it, to regret words spoken in cruelty or actions done meanly under the disguise of courage or honesty. All it does is to put us on better terms with ourselves; we preen ourselves because we are repentant. If we can make practical amends, well and good; if we cannot, we should forego the luxury of the secret abasement, let the past bury its dead (as Leslie had put it) and refuse to let that past cast its smear from ourselves into the lives of those who have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
I walked along North Side, past the place where Ned and I had lived, past the church where we had been married. The Rise streamed in silver and brass down from one common to St. John’s Road and up towards another. The masonic minarets flashed and twinkled in the brilliant light.
I found myself looking forward in love to a homecoming, a greeting, to the day’s news, to the evening’s exchanges. How had things gone? Was he tired? Had any letters come? Anything interesting?
A boy on a bicycle came toiling up the hill, swaying on the saddle, schoolcap on the back of a round fair head, face burnished with sun and sweat, lips rounded in a gasping whistle. It was so like Dicky as he used to be that for a moment I was almost recaptured by time; but then he dismounted to speak to a girl, and his voice was a stranger’s. He was nobody I knew, no part of anything I had known. The whole neighbourhood was suddenly unfamiliar; I had no business in this place; it had no business with me. I saw a new name on a shop front.
A stranger there myself, I was free.
First published in 1954 by Macmillan & co. ltd
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Copyright © Pamela Hansford Johnson, 1954
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