‘You mustn’t use that ugly word, pet. You are a dear boy, but you can’t help me.’
‘How do you know? Tell me what sort of trouble you’re in! I’m down here all on my own – I’m free to help in any way I can. I came to London just to help you. Of course, I’m a bit hard up …’
The waitress arrived and we had to be quiet. We sat and looked at each other as the soup plates arrived. Then she said, ‘I’m being watched night and day at Josie’s place. It’s her cousin – the one you saw. I know he is connected with the divorce in some way. They have got a man watching me, the solicitors. I believe he has a gun in his pocket.’
‘Did he follow you here, to this restaurant?’
‘I don’t believe so. I went in and out of a few shops by different doors on my way to meet you. That’s why I was slightly late.’ So she had noticed she was late.
‘Virginia, darling, I want to tell you something. I want you to understand that I do dearly love you. It’s not just sexual attraction. I know all about the age difference between us, but it makes no difference to me – I love you just as you are. And I know more about you and your private life than you may think. It has no effect on my feelings for you.’ I said that rather hastily, for a slight flicker of expression came over her face, a tiny change, something so transient – and then she directed her gaze down at the tablecloth.
The intuitive core in me felt her alter; but of course I overruled that and went on. ‘It’s true you are being watched, Virginia, but not for the reasons you imagine. You are being watched by Christopher Spaldine and he intends you no good. He has nothing to do with anyone in the house, but he wants to get revenge on you.’
Half-smiling, she said, ‘Christopher Spaldine? He was one of the boys in the art club, wasn’t he?’
‘He was one of your lovers, Virginia!’
She kept looking at my shoulder with a fixed expression.
I babbled on, offering to guard her and I know not what else; but I had lost contact with her.
The meal was an absolute failure.
We paid the bill, half each at her insistence, and went outside. She was walking rather briskly, her short-cut fair hair bobbing, her head just slightly on one side. I held her arm. There were other people all round us; she could disappear.
‘Come and spend the night with me, Virginia. Please – let me hold you in my arms, just as I used to do!’
I was terrified by the way she walked; she held herself stiffly and moved too fast. I manoeuvred her into a stationer’s shop and talked to her earnestly. She stood gently by me, picking at a thread on her coat, as I tried simultaneously to explain and discount the things Spaldine had told me.
Looking at me, smiling rather crookedly, Virginia said, ‘We had better stop seeing each other, Horry, if you really believe those indecent things Christopher Spaldine said about me.’
That floored me. In the midst of my stammered explanations she said, ‘Darling, I don’t want to hurt you – you have been a dear boy. But if you are connected with all these other people, then I mustn’t have any more to do with you.’
Her face was really rather hard and determined as she spoke.
All these other people … Tears stood in my eyes in exasperation. I clutched her child-like body; Two assistants were standing behind the counter, grinning covertly and thoroughly enjoying our exhibition.
‘Listen,’ I hissed, for all the world like Spaldine himself, ‘Come away! Leave everything! We’ll go and live in another part of London. We’ll get a little flat – I’ll write to Father for money. You shall have no more worries, I swear. I’ll never leave your side. We’ll begin life again together!’
‘I must go, Horry, I must go. You know I couldn’t live with you if you are a friend of Spaldine’s – I have evidence to prove he is in my cousin’s pay.’
In her agitation she pushed from me and hurried from the shop. She was buttoning up her gloves as she went, and it was frightfully important they should be buttoned. I stood there for a moment reeling. I knew it was hopeless. Then I had to follow or she would be gone for ever.
I passed the grinning assistants. ‘Fuck off!’ I said.
Virginia was walking slowly along the Strand. Unable to think what to say to her, I stayed a pace or two behind her. She turned left, down one of the side streets that lead to the Embankment. Perhaps she was going to throw herself in the Thames?
She started when I humbly touched her arm.
‘Forgive me for upsetting you by anything I said, dearest Virginia! I hate Spaldine’s guts – I told you, he attacked me, so he hates mine. Nor do I know any other single person in the world who knows you. Your past life is no business of mine, Virginia. I love you. Don’t turn me away!’
‘You’re very sweet,’ was all she said. We walked side by side silently. We stood looking at the Thames.
The intuitive core in me told me that she was seeking for ways to cast me off finally. I made an error then that I was to make again a few years later, more fatally. I begged her to marry me.
She stood there against me, her head down, as I grasped her arms through her thin coat – a ridiculous position, I suppose.
Finally, she looked up at me, with her face full of sweetness and gentleness. She said, ‘What an amazing history we have had, Horry! You are a wonderful person and we have been like two children together, haven’t we? But I have deeply misled you. Please don’t be hurt. I’ve always warned you that life is much more complicated than you think. My own life is too involved for anyone else to contemplate. I already owe several thousand pounds to people – you could not shoulder such debts.’
‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘It’s all too true, I’m afraid. But I can’t marry you for a different reason. I am already married. My husband was a terrible gambler, and I am saddled with his debts …’
‘You’re married …’ It was as if I was drowning. No air reached my lungs.
‘It was wrong of me not to tell you, darling, when you have been so sweet. Everyone who gets mixed up with me comes to grief.’
She lifted my hand and kissed it, glanced almost furtively at me, and then hurried off, walking with her quick light gait up the street we had come. I stood staring, my feelings curdling within me. She glanced back once before she disappeared. I started to cry, burying my eyes in my knuckles.
Was she married? Only a month before, I would have believed her had she told me she was a German spy. Now I did not know what to believe. If she said what she said just to shake me off, then her gambit was a success. I was beaten. There was nothing I could do for her; whichever way I turned, she would see my move as a hostile one, part of the plot against her. There was no room for truth in her world of lies.
How would you judge Virginia Traven? For years I made no attempt to pass judgement. She hurt me, but hurt seems intrinsic in human relationships, and the hurt was not her intention – in almost any situation, she was the injured party. As for her lies, they enriched and widened my narrow little world.
There remains the sexual aspect of the matter. How much harm did she do to the boys she seduced, to the boys with whom she so genteelly and discreetly lay? Speaking for myself, I was delighted to be seduced, I thirsted for it, I went to great pains to be seduced. The same would undoubtedly be true of the odious Spaldine and Angel-Face Knowles. Virginia was no harpy, devouring all who came along her path. She only took in those who sought her out, and there was nothing perverted in her actual love-making.
True, Spaldine was unbalanced by the affair; but I found some evidence, thinking back, that he was unbalanced long before Sister arrived at the school. He had run away from school once – one of only three boys who ever did so; that might seem like a sane act against the insanity of Branwells, but nobody who listened alertly to Spaldine would have regarded him as an apostle of reason.
And there was Knowles. Did he develop a mother-fixation through his thrilling association with Virginia? He became quite well known in later
life as a mountaineer, and I read with curious insight in an illustrated magazine article that his wife was ‘several years older’ than he. Was that an attempt to relive the Virginia experience? I believe it much more likely that he was that way inclined long before, or why would he have been drawn to Virginia in the first place?
Virginia had powerful advantages over all the other girls I knew in those days, first among which was her experience. She was past the age of being embarrassed or of thinking of sex as a dirty joke. I was still at that age; so were my girl friends, like Esmeralda. Loving for Virginia, and consequently for her favoured boys, was a comforting and soothing thing. In her modest way she was expert; and expertise is really the butter on the bread of sex.
It is curious at last to write on the subject of Virginia. She passed out of my life twenty-eight years ago. Yet she has never been entirely absent from my life, even when I have not thought of her for months, perhaps years. Now I am on the subject, I can hardly bear to come off it.
I loved Virginia well. I did not love her for sex alone. Before I found out about all the lies, I believed her to be good, almost saintly. I can still see how and why I thought her so wonderful, although irrelevant things like snobbery clouded my judgement – for she must always have been no more prosperous than my family, and so the simple way she came into humble cafés with me was not the elegant piece of broad-mindedness I imagined it at the time, but the indifference of custom.
So I come back to my first intuitions about her – that she had been deeply hurt. Something in her childhood had disrupted the entire course of her life … such a judgement is a cliché now, so much so that it is often patronizingly dismissed by the sophisticated. But the elementary perception that childhood injustices warp lives has done little to affect the general consensus of opinion, which acts on an older and more primitive principle, that an eye merits an eye, that sin deserves punishment. In many cases it is the punishment which fathers the sin.
But I refuse to think of Virginia in these text-book terms. Something had severely hurt her in childhood – no doubt her nature was also prone to receive the hurt. As an adult, she would be classified now as paranoic, I suppose.
In my youthful eyes she was none of these things; she was only herself, a woman in whose arms I had first tasted beauty and release, and through them discovered my better self.
She left me standing by the Thames. It seemed to me that I would never be able to recover myself, that I had lost too much. After a little while it occurred to me to run after her, to seize her, to force her to believe me and tell the truth. But by then it was too late.
For the rest of the day I wandered through the city. The painful deflections of life that all the towns of Europe were suffering found their echo in England’s capital. Barricades of sandbags were going up; the fountains were turned off in Trafalgar Square. A platoon of soldiers was marching towards Westminster; I stopped to watch them go by, looked at the set faces of the men, lacking individuality. Already children were being evacuated to the country. Their place was being taken by men in uniform.
Idly, I looked about to see if by any chance I could see Nelson. But it was my father I wanted. Perhaps he would come down to London and persuade me to go back home with him …
The nights were closing in. As the sun went down, blackouts went up.
I had begun to relish my melancholy, but hunger overtook me. In those days I was always hungry. Half-lost, pretending I was wholly lost, I stopped on my way towards my favourite pie shop and drank a cup of tea at one of those wooden tea-stalls on wheels which stood in Leicester Square, enjoying being among the down-and-outs. Only when I had finished my pie-and-peas-did initiative return to me.
Virginia had told me Josie’s surname. With luck, I would find it in the phone directory, and her number. I could ring Virginia; the next day was Sunday. We could meet again. Somehow I could persuade her that I was no part of the conspiracy she imagined to be building against her. I would make her see I was innocent.
Back at Lou’s, I borrowed her directory, found Josie’s number, and put through the call. I knew Virginia hated talking on the telephone; perhaps she thought of it as a sinister instrument; but this was a case of necessity.
Josie answered. I recognized her languid voice immediately.
Without thought, I said, ‘I have a present for Virginia. Tell her I must meet her at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. She must meet me, because I am then leaving London almost immediately.’ I named a church I had noticed near her house; church seemed a good canny idea.
It may have been the idea of a present; although I had never given her anything, I knew she would be childishly delighted by a present. As I was setting out to meet her that Sunday morning, I belatedly realized that I had indeed better take a present, just in case Virginia did turn up.
I had nothing to give her. I had no money with which to buy her anything. For a moment, I contemplated stealing a piece of Lou’s costume jewellery. Then I remembered that I had in my wallet the little silver holder to contain books of postage stamps which my mother had given me on my fifteenth birthday. The intention had always been to have my name engraved on it, but fortunately this had not been done. Virginia could have it.
Unthinkingly, I had chosen a time when a service was in progress in the church. Great sadness filled me as I stood by the wide deserted steps and looked across the faded prospect of Hyde Park, listening to the organ. In a way, I wanted this all to be a failure, wanted to lose Virginia, wanted everything to be spoilt and broken. That would be only just, and in tune with the dismal years that were past.
When I saw her coming I forgot all that and knew I had at least some strength to fight.
Such joy to see her again, worn and brave and small and half-nodding her greeting at me! I smiled and took her hand.
‘We’re late for the service, Virginia! Let’s have a walk in the park!’
‘Josie teased me and said it would do me good to go to church!’
‘Perhaps it might do us both good. We’ll try and make it next Sunday, shall we?’
‘Horry, I did not expect to see you again after what I told you yesterday. I can’t spare much time now, only I didn’t want you to be sad, so I came to see you.’
‘I’m not sad, Virginia. There’s something more I must say to you.’
‘More even than you said yesterday?’ She gave a painful smile.
We crossed the road and walked familiarly together, relieved for the moment not to have to talk.
When we were in the park she said, ‘Darling, I should not have come. But I am frightened. To tell you the truth, I am getting a bit frightened to remain in the house. There is a man in the street watching me – it’s not who you said it was, it’s another man. I’m sure he has a big gun in his pocket. I’m afraid they are going to kill me.’
I just did not understand that she believed what she was saying. Trying to laugh it off, I said, ‘You’re making it all up, darling!’
Perhaps she also had thought about the whole situation over-night. Perhaps she saw, through the veil of all that obsessed her, that I was no part of the conspiracy against her. Perhaps she had struggled against herself, and won, and come to me to give me another chance. I don’t know. But I should not have told her she was making it all up! By her expression, I knew I had committed a bad tactical blunder.
‘You don’t know my father! He’s a dangerous man! He would quite easily have my sister and me shot to inherit my grandfather’s money.’
I blurted out, ‘You haven’t got a sister, Virginia!’ Maybe I hoped shock therapy would work.
She began to walk on, talking rapidly, telling me I was getting involved in something I did not understand. Her gas-mask case rolled against her hip. Tagging by her side, I had to admit to myself that she was, after all, right; yesterday I had been innocent; today I was involved and no longer innocent. Perhaps she was correct to fear me because I was a part of her world, just as Britain had finally become involved in th
e far more squalid delusions of the man over in Berlin.
So I broke into what she was saying, and asked, ‘Tell me just one thing – tell me if you said you were married simply to save me further hurt. You aren’t really married, are you? I can’t believe it!’
We stopped under a tree and looked at each other. Her grey uncertain eyes were searching my face. I believe she was not married; that would have been too binding a contract for her elusive nature; and possibly what she said next was the nearest she could come to an admission it was so. Lowering her head, she said five heavy words:
‘He left me long ago.’
The words must have contained an inner truth – perhaps part of that secret truth of hers of which I had always been aware.
From a great distance I heard myself saying faintly, ‘If you are free, Virginia, I will marry you.’
And from a great distance she replied, ‘I shall never be free of him.’
They were words of farewell. I stood there, looking as she receded from me. I called to her, broke into a run, thrust my little silver token into her gloved hand. She walked on with it.
Circumnavigating bushes, dodging behind the park railings, I kept her in sight until her slight figure was obscured behind a building.
She walked off into the streets of London, those quiet grey Sunday streets, with her gas-mask swinging on her hip, and I never encountered her again. For a long while, when I had other girls, far more orthodox girls, when I was in uniform and they came and gaily went, I would recall Virginia – recall her dear lack of vividness with such vividness! – and fear for her in the double jungle: the real jungle of London and the equally real one that she had built in her own mind. For I understood by then how beyond help she was.
BRIAN ALDISS
A Soldier Erect
or Further Adventures
of the Hand-Reared Boy
Epigraph
As she turned around, I saw part of her backside, leaned over and laid my face on it, crying about my broken drum; the evening sunshine made it all bright – how strange I should recollect that so clearly, but I have always recollected sunshine.
The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy Page 13