by Barbara Vine
No more than three yards separated us. My weak smile was already forming, the ‘Hallo, Eden’ shaping itself on my tongue as her eyes met mine, lingered there, staring and wide – and looked away. In that moment I lost whatever feeling I had ever had for her. I was astounded, for in my eyes she was a grown-up and I still half a child, and I was also ashamed for her and dismayed. There was no doubt she had seen me. I knew she had seen and recognized me. Nothing kills like contempt and contempt for her came upon me in a hot flood of blushes so that I put my hands to my face, cooling it with my fingers. Eden and her man crossed the road and lost themselves in the crowd but when I closed my eyes, there she was, I could still see her, on the black retina, her beautifully made, fine-boned face like Francis's, the lipstick red as a clown's, pillar-box paint against that white skin, the eyes as blue as marbles and the hair as gilded as a cherub's on a ceiling. Her dress had been white, cross-over and draped, her legs bare and her feet in white Betty Grable shoes with heels made for a high stepping trot like a horse's.
If I had mentioned it to my father, he would have said I was mistaken. I thought about it a lot. I thought of how I should have had to describe her, had he asked, and how, when he heard of the Grecian dress and the golden topknot, he would have said:
‘That doesn't sound like my little sister. You mistook someone else for her.’
Of course I had not. It had been Eden and she was in London when everyone believed her in Scotland. The mysteries and secrecies beloved of the Longleys had a new mystery and a new secret. I wondered if Eden was still a Wren even and if she were living in London or only staying there. I even wondered, so paranoid an effect can this kind of thing have on one, if it was only I that was excluded from this secret, if all along, my father and my mother, too, had known Eden's precise whereabouts and had kept the truth from me for reasons unfathomable; if Vera had known when she told my father one day that Eden was in Londonderry and the next in Gourock. And what of poor Chad who had spoken, so it seemed to me, so sorrowfully of his failure to achieve Eden's love, though not for the want of trying?
I find myself creating mysteries, too. It is not for nothing that I am a Longley. Of course, I am trying to arrange these recollections of mine in sequence, not remembering events and revelations, so to speak, out of order. It was a good while later, though, years, before I did discover the truth of this. This was at the time of the uncovering of many truths. Eden had left the WRNS. That August, it was three quarters of a year since she had been Leading Wren Longley, stationed at Londonderry, and in Scotland she had never been. In London she had a job as secretary-companion to an old woman in Belgrave Square called Lady Rogerson. The odd thing was that she got this job through one of those gentlefolk relatives of Chad's that she had met through him, though Chad was ignorant of it all. Eden simply used him in her progress towards the main chance as she used everyone useful. She lived in Belgrave Square and after a while (she once told us), Lady Rogerson looked on her almost as a daughter – well, a niece. The man with the brown, curly hair was a sort of cousin of Lady Rogerson's and he too had a title, though I can't remember what. It was not he, anyway, whom Eden finally caught as a result of living in Belgravia.
All this was well known to Vera all the time.
I was so used to thinking of Laurel Cottage as Vera's house that it came as a shock to hear my father tell my mother that he supposed it would be sold now and the proceeds divided between Vera, Eden and himself. That, of course, was the way my grandmother had left it. My father had waived his right because Vera needed somewhere in which to make a home for Eden, and then the war had come, disrupting everything. The sale of Laurel Cottage might with luck realize fifteen hundred pounds and my father talked a lot about how he would use his five hundred share – build on to the house perhaps, move house, buy a car, re-furnish the living-room, go to Switzerland and see my mother's relations – spending it in imagination several times over. For a bank manager, which he had just become, he was naïve about money.
Harder-headed and altogether more realistic, my mother never believed in that money from the start. She was a woman who had no compunction about saying, I told you so. ‘See if I'm not right’ was another phrase of hers and she usually was.
‘When your mother died, I told you to sell the house. Gerald would have got a house for Vera and Eden could have lived with us. Things would have been very different if that had happened.’
They would, indeed.
‘Eden wouldn't have been made too big for her boots for one thing,’ said my mother. ‘It doesn't do people any good to be idolized.’
My father said in an unpleasant tone that there was not much risk of that round here. It was interesting to speculate what it would have been like having Eden as a sort of big sister. I had no idea this had ever been proposed. Would it have interfered with what George Eliot calls ‘the stealthy convergence of human lots’, altering the course of things, so that Vera on her seventy-eighth birthday might have come along to tea with me with Helen last week? And might Eden have been there, too, a sprightly, blonded sixty-three? Might Francis have strolled in among us to throw a word of disaster in that way he always had, as Ate flung the golden apple among the party guests? And Jamie, his name unchanged and his own, not a self-appointed exile? Who knows? I think somehow that things would have been much the same, given the war and the personalities of the players in the drama.
Eden never wrote. Vera often did and continued to mention Eden as being in Scotland and still in the WRNS. My father never wavered in his custom of reading her letters aloud at the breakfast table, and as I heard details of Eden's life relayed, though I didn't doubt my own eyes, I began to think she had been guilty of no greater subterfuge than that of coming to London on leave without visiting us or seeing Vera. We were enduring V1 attacks which only came to an end when the Allies overran the Vi launching sites in the Pas de Calais. But Duncan Sandys was a bit premature when in September he said that ‘the Battle of London was over except for a few shots’.
That same month, the V2s started, those first rockets, which travelled so fast that one could not hear them before they exploded. By that time one was either dead or not as the case may be. We called them ‘flying gas mains’, just as we called the V1s that droned more loudly before they cut out and exploded, doodlebugs or buzz bombs. One of the last of these V2s to reach England fell on Colchester, making a direct hit on the nursing home where Vera had had Jamie and causing hundreds of casualties, more than fifty of them fatal. My father flew into a panic about Vera and Jamie. Suppose this were a new phase of the war, a kind of swan song of aggression to be unleashed on East Anglia?
Five months later it was all over. If Eden were still in the WRNS at the time the war ended, she must have been one of the first of the five million service men and women to be demobilized. Ernest Bevin announced that releases would begin on 18 June and a week later Vera wrote to say Eden had been ‘demobbed’. Even my father thought that strange. Gerald had to wait a good deal longer and was not to reach home till the autumn of 1945, by which time Francis had gone up to Oxford and Vera, for a change, been to us on holiday.
My mother consented to this, I think, because she enjoyed the company of small children, a rarer quality in women than one might think. Most people, whatever they may say, find the company of little children boring. My mother, though intelligent and quite quick and brusque with adults, had infinite patience with children. She used to say she liked the way they had not yet learnt the shifts and slyness and affectations of grown-ups.
Jamie was about fifteen months old by this time. He had curious colouring, very attractive but unusual, his skin being a light, clear olive while his hair was brightly fair. His eyes were brown; not light brown or hazel or speckly blue-gold, but an uncompromising rich, dark brown, as deep a shade as a Spaniard's or even an Indian's might be. And he didn't look like anyone in the family. You know the way babies have a definite ‘look’ of some uncle or aunt or forebear, so that the overall
impression is of a copy of that person, but when you examine the face feature by feature the similarity breaks down. I used to pore over albums of old Longley and Naughton photographs and saw this again and again, how the infant Vera, for instance, seemed a reincarnation of Great-aunt Priscilla, how my father immediately brought to mind old William, the shoemaker. Eden and Francis, as I have said, might have been taken for twins. Jamie, though, was himself and only himself. He looked no more like the Longleys (except for his hair) than he did like Gerald who has a very long face and almost pointed head that Helen says he used to attribute, I don't know how accurately, to his mother's narrow pelvis and the fact that he took an unconscionably long time being born. I decided Jamie must look like some Hillyard forebear but no Hillyard family albums were available to me.
He was devoted to his mother. This was only to be expected since he had lived since his birth almost exclusively in Vera's sole company. I know my mother would have liked to play with him and talk to him and hold him on her lap but of this she had very little chance. Jamie didn't cry much. He simply didn't respond to others. He would sit silent or stand with his thumb in his mouth, neither accepting nor rejecting overtures, and if you took him on your knees, he suffered your caressing hand, your smiles and your encouragement in wary tenseness, his body growing stiff, at last slipping down and going to Vera with his arms held out. To do her justice, she did not particularly encourage this. I thought her nicer than she used to be. She was much pleasanter to my mother, for one thing, adjuring Jamie to ‘go to Aunt Vranni’. (Since Helen's comments, Vera had never again advocated the use of ‘auntie’.) She even agreed to going out with my parents one evening and leaving me to baby-sit. Jamie, she said proudly, had been brought up to know six was his bedtime and because of this he never gave her bad nights.
People loved going out and about London that summer. Austerity was with us and there was nothing nice to eat and nothing nice to wear, no luxury or even comfort, not much petrol, but the living theatre had never been better, or the cinema. And there was a delicious intoxication about wandering lighted streets in freedom and safety, knowing there would be no darkness to fall from the air. Vera said, without self-pity or touting for sympathy, quite cheerfully even:
‘This will be the first time I've been out in the evening for over three years.’
Jamie woke up ten minutes after they had gone out. I believe now that somehow all the events of that evening – not the waking of Jamie, of course – were engineered by Vera and Eden for the furtherance of their purposes, but things had gone wrong. They had got the wrong evening. Or one or other of them had. Eden, probably. These things are not easy if you communicate mostly by letter. Vera had been very keen to go out on the Friday night, not the Saturday, so I assume all this had been pre-arranged by them for the Saturday but Eden had made a mistake. I believe now that they wanted to give, in the presence of my father and mother, and secondarily in that of Tony Pearmain, a demonstration. They wanted to show those three people, those most important three people – I don't think I counted much, I was only seventeen – how they had made their lives and how they were to be accepted before proceeding to the next phase.
Jamie's waking like that put me into a minor panic. I knew very little about babies and had no idea how to handle them when they cried. My instinct was to shut the door on Jamie, go out of earshot of his cries or stuff cotton wool into my ears.
Of course I didn't do this. I opened the door stealthily and looked in. At sight of me, his crying changed to screams. He was in a cot that had once been mine, encaged, standing up, shaking the bars, and I remember thinking how odd it was that we put our small children in cages, that we didn't construct a cot that had some other confining arrangement instead of bars. That was the last coherent rational thought I had for a long time.
Jamie had worked himself into a panic and at first he wouldn't let me touch him. He flung his body backwards and forwards, pushing and punching me when I tried to get hold of him. I suppose I have since then heard children make worse noises, my own children for instance, but the noise Jamie made that evening has stuck in my mind as being uniquely horrible, perhaps because it was an absolutely uninhibited expression of real distress, real pain and loss. I am sure Vera genuinely believed he wouldn't wake up because he hadn't done so for months and months, I am sure she wouldn't have gone out if she had thought he would wake. Never before had he wakened to find her not there – worse, to find her not there and someone else there instead. His misery and terror seemed boundless. At last I succeeded in picking him up and getting him downstairs. He was sodden all over, from tears, dribble, urine and sweat.
There was nothing I could do to stop him crying. Vera no longer breast-fed him but she had weaned him on to a cup, not a bottle. No Longley child had ever been allowed a dummy. I tried to stick his thumb in his mouth but he screamed all the more and I later learned that Vera had spent months getting him out of that one by putting aloes on his thumb. I couldn't stop him yelling so I let him yell while I inexpertly changed his napkin and his pyjama trousers and dried his face. By then I was in almost as much of a panic as he was. He had been screaming for half an hour and his face was purple, the veins standing out on the forehead. I had heard of babies having convulsions and I was afraid he might have one, might in fact have been having one at that moment, for I doubted my ability to recognize a convulsion if I saw it.
I shouted at him, ‘I will never baby-sit for anyone else as long as I live,’ a resolution I have very nearly kept to, and at that moment the doorbell rang.
We had lived through violent times, we had lived through a war, but somehow one had a far greater sense of safety in those days. Alone in the evening with a baby in a London suburban house now, I would hesitate before opening the front door, I would certainly call out to know who it was. Then, it wouldn't have crossed my mind. Holding the screaming Jamie under my arm in the way I had seen market-going farmers in picture-books carry squealing pigs, bellowing at him to shut up, I opened the door. Outside on the step stood Eden and a man.
‘Goodness, darling, I never heard such a fearful noise in all my life! You can hear it all the way down the street.’
‘Were you trying to kill it and we interrupted you?’ the man said.
The way I was carrying poor Jamie must have inspired this. I hoisted him on to my shoulder where he hung, sobbing.
‘Aren't you going to ask us in?’ said Eden. Typical Longley. The quintessence of Longleyism was to ask petty, pointless, rhetorical questions when one was up to one's neck in trouble. I opened the door wider and stood back.
Bludgeoned as I was by Jamie's roaring, there was enough awareness left in me to notice their appearance and be astonished by it. Parked at the kerb was a red sports car. (Had Eden really heard Jamie down the street inside that?) The two of them looked as if they had been dressed up to advertise it in some glossy magazine published perhaps in South Africa or New Zealand, since we had nothing glossy here, neither magazines nor clothes nor people to wear them. But these two glowed like no one but film-stars. They even looked cleaner than the rest of us and what with fuel scarcities and soap scarcities, no doubt they were. Eden had on a blue linen suit covered with a pattern of white flowers, her companion a blazer with some sort of badge that indicated he had rowed for something or played cricket for something and a shirt that glowed with whiteness, crisp and frosty as Wall's ice cream. He looked young even to me, in his middle twenties, a fresh-faced, brown-haired man, a lot like Richard Burton whom no one had heard of then.
Eden, of course, wasn't going to introduce him. Oblivious apparently to the din, she stood looking round her at our shabby hallway from which the air-raid shelter had been removed, leaving scars on the oak parquet floor, and where the black-out curtains still hung dispiritedly at the window by the front door.
‘I'm Tony Pearmain,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’
I said who I was but Eden had already told him, giving him a run-down in the car, I expect, on wha
t he would find when he got here.
‘They're all out,’ I said, shouting above Jamie.
‘All?’
How was it that I seemed to know, even then, that she was acting? Perhaps because she was no actress.
‘Didn't you know Vera was here?’
‘Vera? Here?’
It was surprising, of course. Or it would have been a surprise if she hadn't already known.
‘Well, of course. This is Jamie. Don't you recognize him?’
‘They change so quickly at that age. Can't you stop him making that ghastly noise?’
Tony Pearmain put out his arms and took Jamie from me. The result was magical. Did he smell wonderful, radiate self-confidence, communicate in some mysterious fashion beyond the five senses, through his pores or his nerve ends, that here was security, here was infinite warmth and kindness, here were the everlasting arms? Whatever it was, Jamie recognized it and shut up. He laid his once more wet, sticky, sweaty face against the sleek pile of Tony Pearmain's blazer and grew silent, only gulping occasionally as he got his breath back. Poor Tony had this gift with children. Because he loved them, they loved him, and all gravitated towards him, pins to a lodestone, and his presence made them quiet and good. The abiding tragedy of his life has been that he has never had children of his own and that the one child he might have loved and been loved by, circumstances made repugnant to him.
That evening was the occasion of Jamie's first meeting with Tony. I have told him how Tony held him and quieted him but he shied away from this, he hated being told, and insisted I must be mistaken. This must have been some other boyfriend of Eden's, not ‘Pearmain’ who was so cold and distant with him, who sent him away as soon as he could – thus, of course, carrying on the Longley family tradition which had begun with Helen and continued with Francis. But Tony it was, Tony who performed this miracle. I stood in the hall, engulfed in relief, savouring the glorious peace, hardly aware for a while that Eden was there behind me.