Echo of Barbara

by John Burke

  Paula said: ‘You must be mad. He knows his own daughter —’

  ‘After ten years? He remembers what Barbara was like ten years ago. She’s changed a lot since then, and he’ll be expecting her to have changed. You look like someone who could have grown up from what Barbara was then.’

  For a moment she looked intolerably sad. The shadows ran like tears down her cheeks as she moved her head away from the mellow light above her. She lifted one hand as though to brush away the cobweb of a dream.

  ‘He’d know at once,’ she insisted. ‘If they were as close as you say, there must have been all sorts of little things — catch-phrases, pet names, places they went to and jokes they had together . . .’

  ‘I remember most of them,’ said Roger. He had listened to so many of their shared jokes, their walled intimacy, and stored them up in his memory. They had sharp, hurtful edges; he could recapture every detail clearly. ‘Maybe there are one or two I’ve forgotten, or never heard of. But you’d be bound to have forgotten them yourself, anyway — Barbara, I mean. I can give you enough to be convincing.’

  ‘It couldn’t possibly work. Do you mean he hasn’t seen her, or a photograph, or anything?’

  ‘He didn’t want her to visit him in prison,’ said Roger. ‘He thought too much of her — didn’t want to upset her, even when she was old enough to face up to such things. And even if he had wanted her to visit him’ — his lip curled — ‘she wouldn’t have gone.’

  Again there was silence between them.

  Abruptly the girl said: ‘I don’t like the sound of your sister. Or maybe it’s just the way you put it. Maybe —’

  ‘Put it any way you like,’ he said; ‘she was a bitch. A weak, dismal snob. When I think of how she used to hang around him — all the fuss, all the cuddling and giggling and all the rest of it . . . If that was love — really, honestly, I mean — then why couldn’t she . . .’

  There was no need to finish. Anyway, there were no words keen and destructive enough. He shrugged his contempt. And Paula Hastings said:

  ‘You think I’m like her?’

  ‘I say you look like her. Enough like her for me to have noticed. Certainly enough for my father to think that you’re Barbara. The rest will be a matter of acting.’

  ‘What would happen,’ she demanded wryly, ‘if she came back while I was in the middle of the act?’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘And afterwards — when it’s all over . . .?’

  ‘When we’ve got the money,’ said Roger, ‘you can walk out again. I can promise you a comfortable share. You can take it, and go. You can throw a fit of temper: you can say all the things Barbara said about my father and his money — only this time you can say them to his face. Then you leave in a fury, and everything’s fine. For everybody.’

  ‘Except for him,’ she said softly.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ Roger assured her. He could do so without reservations. He knew that once the breach had been made, once his father’s defences had crumbled, everything would work out. Sam Westwood would soon find himself back to normal; he would shrug off all the unhappiness and disillusionment; freed from his own strange imprisonment, he would step back into his own world. There would be the fast cars and the good restaurants. Sometimes now Roger went into those places where his father had once been known. Business demanded it, and he could cope as confidently as anyone else. But he did not belong. When his father began living again, he would belong. Now the chance was here; the instrument was before him. He said: ‘You’ve got to come in on this. For you there’s nothing to lose.’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ she said distantly. ‘I’ve got nothing left.’

  ‘All it means is working hard for a week or two. I’ll see you every day. The fact that you won’t know our present house or the neighbourhood won’t matter at all — Barbara walked out before we moved there. I’ll give you enough details of the old place for you to make the right remarks. And I’ll drag up every single thing I remember about Barbara herself, as a person. You’ll have to sink yourself right into the part so that you think of yourself as Barbara. You’ll have to become somebody else.’

  ‘Nothing would suit me better’ — her voice was dry and somehow very old — ‘than to become somebody else.’

  Chapter Five

  To become somebody else.

  She had tried it so often. In Sollenbury itself she had sought desperately for a new self to believe in — or even a new self to convince other people. Sometimes she seemed to have achieved the latter: certainly she baffled other people, and made them talk about her and stare after her in the street; but inside she was still this unsatisfactory person who never got what she wanted and never gave other people what they wanted. In the end she had come to London . . . and here she was, a Paula Hastings whom Sollenbury might or might not have recognized, but who was all too familiar to herself.

  ‘I don’t know who you think you are,’ her father had so often growled.

  She did not know herself.

  Her mother and father had never made clear what they expected from her. Sometimes they had made a great fuss of her; at other times her father would let fly in one of his outbursts.

  She was the only one of the family who had been to a grammar school. Something working away obscurely in her mother’s mind had prompted the resolution that Paula should have a proper schooling. The two older boys had not had it: they had not been encouraged to work at their primary school, and had drifted into the new secondary modern school — ‘and none the worse for that,’ as Mr. Hastings had growled. Paula was the one they had experimented with. She had had a good teacher at the primary school, and at home she was badgered to do her best. It was like putting a bet on. You took a chance. But naturally you didn’t throw away all your money: you just shoved a little bit on, just trying your luck and seeing how it turned up. Paula was nagged into trying hard for the grammar school. She got in, and so had her chance. It was unlikely, from all the signs, that her younger brother and sister would follow her.

  ‘Try anything once,’ her father had sceptically agreed. ‘Might as well have one clever ’un in the bunch.’

  That was when he was in a good temper. At other times it would be ‘that bloody school’ and ‘airs and graces’ and ‘bloody books and God knows what’. And inevitably: ‘Let me tell you that when I was your age . . .’

  Worst of all was her success in the school Dramatic Society. ‘Standing up there, makin’ a fool of yourself. Play-acting — I never thought to see such nonsense.’

  She was deaf to this sort of thing. At last she had found something that mattered. It was not that she wanted others to marvel at her — ‘flauntin’ yourself, just showin’ off, that’s what’ — but that she loved to lose herself in these ready-made people. She became somebody else. She had a quick ear, and a retentive memory: she reached out and took hold, and captured the essence of other beings. It was intensely satisfying. And there were so few problems. In a play she was complete. She was a neat, self-contained, persuasive person. There was none of the split that was so infuriating in real life — the double realities of home with its noise and derision, and school with its books and the poems and the plays and the music, all leading on to some goal that she was sure she, herself, would never reach. Things had, in a play, been settled in advance: all she had to do was slide into the part and let herself become the person who was there waiting for her. She did not find the restrictions irksome; they comforted her.

  It could not last. The refrain became more clamorous: ‘Let me tell you that when I was your age . . .’

  She had left school when she was fifteen, without even sitting for her general certificate. The headmaster had been annoyed. He had lectured Mr. and Mrs. Hastings on their duties to the child and to the community. Grammar school education could not be given to everyone . . . lucky for those chosen ones who got it . . . full advantage ought to be taken . . . to leave at a crucial moment like this was to throw away all
the hard work put in by teachers and by Paula herself.

  ‘There’s plenty of hard work for her at home,’ Mrs. Hastings had said, glancing at her husband for his support.

  Mr. Hastings remained silent. Voluble enough outside about the silliness of the school — ‘pack o’ fancy smart alecks’ — and about how he had managed without that sort of stuff when he was a kid, he sat now with his cap between his knees and sucked the corners of his mouth in, left and right alternately.

  The headmaster explained that Paula’s being there had kept another child out, and that now her school career had been wasted. Someone else who ought to have had the chance, and who might have benefited from it, was, in effect, deprived of his or her privilege. He shook his head sadly. They were meant to feel guilty.

  Mrs. Hastings said stubbornly: ‘We’ve kept her here ’s’long as we could. She’s had a fair share. But with the younger ones at home, and everything, I can’t manage, and that’s a fact. She’s to come back and do her bit in the house.’

  Paula left, and did not greatly regret leaving. She was at home for two months and then got a job with Madame Cora, the hairdresser. At least her grammar school education had done that much for her: it was a job to be coveted, and the grammar school testimonial helped. ‘Can’t see what it’s got to do with cuttin’ hair,’ Mr. Hastings grunted. But it helped to be able to say that you had been to that precious school, you couldn’t deny that.

  Paula was happy enough in the job for a while; and yet not happy. She did not feel that she had been cheated of anything; and yet she was conscious of stirrings of revolt. She had been made different from the rest of her family: her mother and father had deliberately prodded her into being just that bit different, and now they could not expect her to slip back and be exactly the same.

  She was aware of an apartness, a sense of being detached from the rest of them. After a while she began to cultivate this sense.

  *

  ‘My sister,’ said Roger Westwood, ‘went to a school at the top of a hill just outside Maidenhead. There was a gravel drive with rhododendrons, and in the spring the crocuses came up through the grass.’

  ‘It sounds . . . nice.’

  ‘It was a dark sort of place. The light never seemed to get into the classrooms, Barbara always said. But it was a good school. Expensive.’

  Paula said: ‘She’d have learnt things there that I never got a glimmering of. They’d have taught her to talk differently.’

  ‘You talk just as she did. Nothing to worry about there.’

  ‘What were the names of her teachers?’

  ‘The headmistress was a stiff old ramrod of a woman who chain-smoked in her study all day long. Miss Howard, her name was. The girls called her Howie. Then there was Miss Macmillan, who was pretty. They all had a thing about her — except Barbara, who said she couldn’t stand that sort of nonsense. Barbara,’ he sourly recalled, ‘was too much wrapped up in my father. She used to tell us about the way the older girls would hang round Miss Macmillan and write poetry about her. Then Miss Macmillan left. She used to teach in a room painted in brown and dark green, with two Van Gogh reproductions on the walls and an upright piano in the corner.’

  ‘And after that — after leaving the school, where did Barbara go?’

  ‘I’ll give you a general outline of that,’ said Roger airily. Already he was confident. She was repelled by the brashness of his face and manner, but at the same time fascinated by the whole idea. It was all fantastic yet irresistible. ‘It doesn’t matter a lot,’ he added. ‘You can make things up for yourself if you need to, because that was after my father had gone to prison.’

  ‘Well, then; while Barbara was still at home with him . . .’

  He put his head on one side with an urchin’s cocky grin. ‘It’s just struck me,’ he said: ‘you are Barbara. You might as well get used to the idea now.’

  She hesitated, then said tentatively: ‘When I was still at home, what sort of thing did I used to say to him? How did I speak?’

  ‘Very much as you’re speaking now.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘You’ve got just the right manner,’ he said. ‘Stiff and sneering — just like Barbara. As though the world was too dirty for you to soil your hands on it.’

  *

  One year she had been the Sollenbury Beauty Queen, chosen at the August Bank Holiday Carnival. It was the sort of thing the headmaster of the grammar school would have frowned on — he did everything he could to discourage his pupils from entering for such contests — but it was nevertheless a coveted position.

  Paula knew that she was the most attractive queen they had had for years. She had been chosen not because she had been a maid of honour for three years and had to be given a turn as beauty queen, and not because she was the daughter of some popular local figure: she had been chosen because she was more beautiful than anyone else in the district.

  ‘A fat lot it means,’ growled her father. ‘Flauntin’ yourself before a lot of gawpin’ idiots — that’s all there is to it.’

  But in some way it lifted her up. She was able to look down on her dull friends, the drab ones who were still at school or leaving for college, talking of becoming school teachers or seeping thankfully into the sooty offices of Sollenbury.

  When older women muttered about her in the street, she was pleased.

  She married young, and not because she had to, either, no matter what they might say. She married Quentin Gardner, and she was in love with him. Also she liked the idea of becoming Paula Gardner and ceasing to be Paula Hastings.

  Quentin was soft-spoken and unlike most of the boys she had met. He was a part-time reporter on the local paper, and they first met when he came to a performance by the Sollenbury Players. Paula had just joined them, being allowed in because of good reports of her school activities: she was not quite the sort of person they were used to, but she was young and gifted and useful.

  The parts they gave her were not what she would have chosen, but they were parts: for at least a few hours she was engulfed in the otherness of a character in a play. Usually the productions were brittle comedies. Shakespeare and even J. M. Barrie lay behind her. It did not matter greatly. She acquired a new voice, a new manner, a new way of walking and standing, with as much devotion as she had done when her head had been full of resounding lines of verse, when she had strutted in costume and forgotten the men and women in their ordinary clothes out there.

  Quentin said she was wasting her time. He always gave the Sollenbury Players a favourable review — it was the done thing — but the first time he took her out he told her exactly what he thought of their general standard and their choice of plays. She was worthy of so many better things — he was sure of it. He talked to her about modern plays, and told her which books to get from the library. He made it clear that he and she understood things that the stunted Sollenbury Players could never comprehend.

  Quentin himself was going to do some really important writing one day.

  The skin on his shoulders was smoother than she had expected a man’s to be, and he had cool hands that she found exciting.

  She married him, and grew to hate him.

  After he had stayed at home on several consecutive occasions when he ought to have been reporting on local fetes and bazaars, he was sacked. She went on working while he talked about finding something that would suit him — something that would not prevent his writing that important work that was ready and waiting if he could only get down to it.

  She worked until just before the baby was born.

  Quentin had a strange talent for staying out of a job and managing to draw National Assistance money without too many questions being asked. Every week he collected the money that they had to live on, and every week she felt herself slipping down — not merely down to the level from which she had so earnestly longed to climb with his help, but into depths she had never envisaged.

  Bitterness on her tongue provoked nothing more than gentle reproa
ches from Quentin.

  ‘But I thought,’ he would say, ‘you were so different from the others. That’s what I saw in you. It’s a blow — really it is — to find you’re as conventional as all the rest. Money and a safe, stodgy job . . . that’s what you’ve really set your heart on, isn’t it? That’s what you’d like me to be interested in.’

  The baby cried, and he sighed with long-suffering patience. Once he even got out of bed, put on his clothes and went out for a walk, because the noise was upsetting him. Often in the evenings, too, he would go out and leave her in the gas-lit kitchen of their tiny house.

  ‘A nagging wife, eh?’ he said lightly, with his most charming grin, when she asked him where he went.

  She looked in the glass and saw that she was going to be grey and ugly. Soon; very soon. A couple of times she took the weekly money he had handed over to her — or, as she thought to herself, the part of it which he had handed over — and went out for a drink, leaving him in with the baby. She had rarely touched spirits before, but she set herself to get drunk and become, even if only briefly, a different person.

  She did not succeed. She remained Paula Hastings; not even, in her own mind, Paula Gardner.

  There was a night when she went out and came back late, and Quentin was not in. Michael was crying upstairs — crying with a hoarse, hysterical sobbing that told he had been alone for a long time.

  It happened again, soon afterwards. This time a neighbour heard it. A complaint was made, and added to other things. Paula, outraged, was visited by a girl slightly older than herself, dressed in a trim, cheap grey suit, who intimated that there was a possibility of the child being taken out of the custody of its parents . . . of proceedings . . . of solemn, high-minded action . . .

  She had her first open row with Quentin. He was hurt. Before long she had another. He was still hurt, but showed that he was capable of hurting back. Their life took on a new colour, a new pattern. They quarrelled, and after each quarrel there was no reconciliation. She discovered that Quentin’s smooth tongue could become harsh; she was scoured by his vindictiveness.