by Angela Huth
‘You must go,’ I said, ‘you’ll be late.’
‘Poor old Face,’ he said.
*
Mrs Fox, of course, was my first visitor. She arrived with daffodils and a honeycomb later that afternoon.
‘There was a helicopter going over towards Battersea Bridge,’ she said. ‘I saw it from the bus so I got out at the next stop and watched it go by. That’s what made me late. The noise! Then there wasn’t another bus for twenty minutes.’ She dumped her parcels at the end of my bed and drew up an upright chair. This morning she had two poppies in her hat and the silver painted goose feathers, left over from Christmas Day, pinned to the lapel of her coat. She looked me up and down and pulled her chair nearer.
‘Shall I tell you something? Last night I went to this Bach Society evening. Well, it was very interesting. We all sang for a couple of hours, then we went into the Meeting Room for coffee and sandwiches. The members, that is. It was a ‘members only’ night. The cream of the Bach followers they think they are, too. I wouldn’t have joined them if I’d known what snobs they were.
‘Anyhow. Roger Nevern, the young American conductor, you know, had agreed to come and meet us. He was half an hour late, which got some of them very worried. The coffee was finished. And when he did come, my! You could hear the gasps going up. All because his hair was long and he was wearing a lovely flowered shirt and tie. I suppose they expected white tie and tails. They could hardly sustain their titters, I can tell you. The rudeness of it, and he was being so polite, taking an interest in each one of us and repeating our names when he was introduced. When he’d gone they all huddled together, these old things, and the rumour was he’d been seen at another do in a pale blue fur coat almost down to his ankles. What a crime! I said. I felt I had to speak out. What a crime! I said, a blue fur coat. Well, they must have heard the note of sarcasm in my voice, because they all turned on me, you know, all their heads spun round simultaneously and they began to go at me, as if I was wearing blue fur.
‘Well, they got as good as they gave, I can tell you. I told them what a bunch of hypocrites they were. Stupid old fools. If Shakespeare himself came back from the dead they’d expect him to be dressed by Moss Bros. Poor dears, they have no notion of genius. They are so confined by their own mistaken little priorities.’ She smiled to herself and began to wander round the room. ‘This is a nice place you’re in,’ she said, ‘will you be out soon?’
‘In a few days,’ I said.
‘When you’re out we will all go to Brighton for some sea air. You need a bit of sea air. We’ll go for the day. I’ll ask Joshua to take us. We’ll go and look for the house Edith and I were brought up in. I hear it’s a bed and breakfast place now, but never mind. You need the sea air.’
When she had gone a young nurse with red hair came in with pills.
‘What a night,’ she said, brightly, ‘we had the same thing happen next door. A very young couple. They’d only been married three months, too. We had a terrible time with the husband. I think he was rather the hysterical type, mind, but we had to give him sedatives. Your husband gone? Back to work, I suppose.’
It was easier not even to pause.
‘Yes. He’s very busy.’
‘He’ll be back,’ she said, ‘and you’ll feel quite different in a few days, I can tell you.’
That afternoon was one of those slow, white afternoons that often happen in late winter, when shadowless light from the sky stretches taut across a window, flatter than the light of spring and more melancholy. On the table that made a bridge over the foot of my bed twelve daffodils, cruelly yellow against the white walls, squashed rigidly together in a tall, thin hospital vase. A thermometer stood in a glass of pink liquid, above the basin, and in a room so drained of colour the yellow of the flowers and the pink of the liquid jarred my eyes. My stomach ached. It was a scooped out hole. I could feel the shape of the hollow among my guts. I waited for it to wither, to close back into place, and the beat of the ache throbbed in my head like a chant.
The bed was uncomforting, narrow and hard. I stretched my feet down and felt the hardness of the iron bed-end. I turned away from the glare of light in the window, and shut my eyes.
*
I kept my eyes shut for several moments after the matron brusqued in on Sunday mornings, shouting at us with a vicious gaiety to get out of bed quickly, or else. She would clatter down the linoleum aisle between the two rows of beds, tweak back the thin curtains with a petulant snap, and stand triumphant as the daylight gushed in on us. I opened my eyes to watch her return journey. Barely raised the lids, for fear of catching her glance and having no energy to reject it. Through a blur of lashes I saw the familiar, low-slung calves that bulged just a few inches above the well-polished heels of her flat brown sensible walking shoes. A confident walk. Miss Peel was full of confidence and authority. She had an amazing head for name-tapes, too. She could recall the precise condition of scores of pairs of bras, vests and knickers, and whether or not they were adequately marked. Her anecdotes, which invariably appealed to her rather more than they did to her audience, were all about underwear. There was one old girl, famous in Miss Peel’s memory, who went through four pairs of gym knickers in one term. In her own mind, Miss Peel felt her sense of humour to be a little risqué, and among the juniors she managed to curb her conversation to shoes, socks and overwear; but her heart was not in it.
Her usual Sunday call echoed down the dormitory.
‘Nylons for those going out with parents, lisle for everybody else, of course, and no powder for any noses, or there’ll be trouble.’
Sunday at school was an icy, lumbering day that bore no relation to the rest of the week. A gap to be endured until the bustle and normality of Monday: a day when the passing of time was unusually slow and the strictures of confinement almost intolerable. We were forced to observe the Lord’s day of rest with stalwart exactitude, and smarten ourselves up to a standard that would delight Christ Himself should He care suddenly to descend. Scratchy overcoats. Straight seamed, lumpy stockings thick as gloves; pathetically drab brown dresses which, in an attempt to liven up, we scrunched in at the waists with huge elastic belts – the most desirable accessories of the early fifties.
On Sundays we wrote uncomplaining letters to our parents and walked in crocodile to church. We were allowed to listen to classical music and read good books, and there were hundreds-and-thousands on whatever the pudding at lunch. But it was the evenings, the fragile evenings full of the sad thundering church bells from the priory church, that filled us with the wild folly of anticipation and the tremulous ache of longing to be free. We would sit on the summer lawn, rugs spread over pine needles from the vast trees, eyes cast down over our pieces of sewing. The headmistress with her tired Rosetti face, curved eyebrows and wispy hair was the only one to sit on a chair. A bible lay on her lap. She would glance, as she glanced a thousand times a day, up to the hills; two dramatic great purple swellings in the sky now, nothing like the scurvy lumps they were to walk over, diseased with sweet-papers and council notices. The headmistress believed in her range of hills. She took strength from them. ‘I will lift up mine eyes,’ as she so often said.
On Sunday evenings she would talk to her seniors about going out into the world, as the time approached – the great unprotective world beyond the school gate. Her voice was always full of promise.
‘Always remember, girls, to kick against the pricks, as St Paul said.’ All would be fine if we kicked against them. She lulled us in to security. ‘And remember, too, that if God be for you, who can be against you?’ She spoke often of the love of God, never of the love of man. We wondered if she had ever been loved herself, by man as well as God. She was so confident of the happy outcome of loving God. She looked happy on it. And the school magazine was full of the news of old girls who, having learnt like us to love Him, had on the way found husbands too, and were leading lives of pleasurable security, as the child-bearing wives of Midland farmers, solicitors,
humble aristocrats and industrial tycoons.
On those Sunday evenings on the shadowy rugs, there wasn’t one of us who didn’t believe that it would all fall into place for us, too. We felt a blinding, overpowering resolve to make our own future work; to kick against the pricks, to stick to what we promised, to go on believing. Trembling with good intention, tears scalded our eyes.
So we left school with all the privilege of having been warned. We left believing in God, in Wordsworth, in our role in life as good wives and mothers. For several years, in fact, some of us still remembered, from time to time, how these old beliefs felt.
*
‘Soo,’ said Jonathan, once, ‘however much I fail you, will you go on forgiving me?’ We were having breakfast in a hard, high and narrow bed somewhere, and he had egg on his chin.
*
Joshua came back in the evening.
‘Feeling better?’ he asked. I raised myself on the pillows and he kissed my forehead. He looked round the bare room. ‘There were such awful flowers on the barrow downstairs that I knew you’d know they had come from there, so I didn’t get any. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’ The hole in my stomach felt smaller. Joshua grinned.
‘You don’t look your best, Face.’
‘I don’t feel my best.’
‘But well enough to come home to-morrow? It’d be nice to have you there for the last few days. I leave on Monday. It’s all finally fixed.’ To-day was Thursday.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He sat on the chair close to my bed and took my hand. His heel began to tap on the floor. ‘Face, Face,’ he said quietly.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. All this muddle. There doesn’t seem much point now, does there?’
‘Not much point in what?’
‘You know. In going ahead. Breaking up your marriage. Living together.’ For a moment or two I thought of moving my hand from under his. But I had no energy to make the gesture.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see what you’ve been thinking.’
‘If we’d had the baby, then of course –’
‘ – of course it would have been different.’
‘Of course.’ Silence. Then I said:
‘What a pity I’m not better at having children. I didn’t realise, when the miscarriage began, two things were at stake.’
Joshua thumped the bed and stopped tapping his heel at last.
‘For God’s sake don’t say things like that. You make me sound more of a shit then even I thought I was.’
‘Sorry.’
He bent very near to me, holding up his hands expressively, like a man trying to sell something.
‘Listen, Face. Listen to me. You’ve got to go back to Jonathan. You’ve known that, I’ve known that, really, all along. You can’t leave someone, just like that, just because your heart doesn’t leap about any more every time he comes into the room, and he annoys you the way he eats his kippers. That’s not what marriage is about, if it’s worth anything at all. Besides, you’ve told me hundreds of times you love him, in a way, haven’t you? Perhaps that way is good enough. And hundreds of times you’ve missed him, I know. Even though you haven’t said anything. But I know, because I’ve watched you. Sometimes, when I’ve been particularly cruel or thoughtless, I’ve seen your face. I know what you’ve thought. You’ve thought: maybe Jonathan isn’t particularly clever or witty or interesting, but at least he’s kind, and he’s always loving and reasonable. You’ve thought that, haven’t you? Am I wrong?’
‘Go on,' I said.
‘My trouble,’ he said, ‘my trouble is that I’m not present in all that I do. Baldwin once pointed out that one should be present in order to be sensual. I’m cruel because I’m thoughtless, and I’m thoughtless about one thing because I’m thinking about another, and so often I get my priorities wrong. And when it comes to you – I have thought about it so much, honestly I have – I don’t think I’m prepared to give up enough for you. I’m too unreliable, too unwittingly unkind. I would only make you unhappy. Perhaps I don’t care enough – and there you are, you see, that’s cruel.’ He began to play with my fingers, hot stony fingers at the end of a weightless arm. Then he smiled at me, quite cheerfully. ‘At least you could rely on Jonathan’s constant loving. It’s a great virtue, consistency. Besides, think how he must miss you, how much he must want you back. Anybody who had been loved by you, and has lost you, would want you back.’
I shut my eyes. Images shifted as in a gently shaken kaleidoscope. The flaring colours of butterflies, a great arc of Norfolk sky, the spray of sand in windy dunes, omelettes on Formica tables, the shimmer of blue sequins.
‘How do you know we’d survive, Face?’ Joshua was saying. ‘Please open your eyes.’
I did. His pale face, now so near, was a fall of imperfect skin – pitted, lined, shadowy. His dark eyes were far back out of reach, sealed behind reflecting lenses.
‘Perhaps we wouldn’t,’ I said.
He sat back. A confusion of expressions crossed his face – surprise, relief, disappointment, perhaps.
‘So what will you do?’ he asked.
‘Go back,’ I said, ‘of course.’
After a long time of silence he fell upon me, kissing me, touching my hair, my ears, my breasts.
‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right,’ he kept saying. ‘We’re both right, aren’t we? But oh Christ, Face.’ He sat up again, still holding both my hands. ‘It’ll be funny, after six months.’
‘It’s been a pretty good time,’ I said. I heard myself laughing, a sort of small, quiet snort. ‘Joshua Heron’, I said.
‘Mrs Lyall?’
‘Joshua Heron, now it’s all over, now everything is over, I feel terribly, terribly tired.’ He smiled back.
‘Don’t go to sleep just yet. I’ve got something for you.’ He felt in his pocket. ‘I didn’t know what to get, really, so I went to Mrs Fox for advice. I’m no good at presents.’
I opened a small box. On a bed of cotton-wool lay her star-sapphire ring, the colour of milky forget-me-nots. When I moved it, even in the fading evening light, the spikes of a star, dazzling razor lines, split the stone.
‘She gave it to me,’ Joshua was saying. ‘She said I could do what I liked with it. What else could I do?’
At that moment, I think it was, when he put it on my finger and held my hand up to the light, I began to cry. Weakly, hopelessly.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Shut up or I’ll think you don’t like it. It looks marvellous. Much better than on her old hands.’
‘I’m thinking of how she’ll miss it. She must have been rubbing it with her other hand for years.’ I was also wondering what Joshua would do that evening. I didn’t want him to be unfaithful now, not before Monday, when our term officially ended. It was a wasted evening, being in bed.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But you needn’t worry. I’m taking Mrs Fox to the Festival Hall. Verdi.’
I stopped crying. Calm, calm, calm.
‘But you hate that sort of music,’ I said.
‘It’ll be different with Mrs Fox. She’ll explain it all to me.’
‘I wish I was coming too.’
‘You don’t like Verdi either.’
‘No.’
‘I wish you were, though. But still, we’ll go to Brighton on Sunday, by special request of Mrs Fox. Would you like that?’
‘Oh yes. I’d like that.’
‘We’ll do that, then.’ He paused, bent down, took my face in his hands and kissed my eyes, forcing them to shut.
‘It’s very odd,’ I said, half-asleep, ‘how the most difficult decisions to make are the easiest ones to change.’
‘I daresay,’ said Joshua, ‘I’ll think of you. I daresay I’ll think of you all through the Verdi.’
Chapter Thirteen
Almost as soon as I arrived back at the flat David Roberts rang.
‘Your fri
endly adviser here again,’ he said. ‘Your time is up, old thing.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘If it will fit in with your plans, Jonathan would like to meet you at six o’clock on Tuesday evening.’
‘Why then, particularly?’
‘Because that is exactly and precisely when the six months will be up.’ He coughed. ‘As a matter of fact, though don’t say you know this, Jonathan is already back in London. I saw him last night. He looked very fit. Remarkably well, considering.’
‘Good.’
‘Might I be so bold as to ask what is going to happen? I mean, after all, I’m the one who’s been keeping the two of you in touch, as it were.’ He laughed to himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I can’t very well tell you before I tell Jonathan. Ring on Tuesday evening.’
‘Ah well, I won’t press you. Anyhow, you know me–the eternal optimist. I’ll be thinking of you both.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Shall I tell him that will be all right, then? Six o’clock, Tuesday?’
‘Yes please. Tell him I’ll be there. And thank you for all your trouble.’
‘That’s all right, old thing. Any time.’
*
Sunday we went to Brighton, the three of us. Mrs Fox wore an old musquash coat dyed blue. The dyeing had not been wholly successful. Streaks of dull brown rippled through the dull blue.
‘I was reading about those fun furs,’ she explained. ‘That’s what gave me the idea.’ On her hat an Alexandra Rose Day rose and a Poppy Day poppy were intertwined with a shining cherry I had not seen before. She rubbed uneasily at the finger on which she used to wear the star-sapphire ring. Now it was replaced by a dim moonstone, whose feel was still strange to her.
It was a cold, bright day. We parked the car in one of the crescents and walked to a small restaurant for lunch. Inside, the dark patterned carpets felt peculiarly soft after the sting of the pavements, and our breath jerked into the air in silver globes.
We climbed a winding staircase to an upstairs room. It was half-filled with people who talked in quiet Sunday voices. On the unoccupied tables stiff white napkins stood on empty plates like solitary flames, and a shaft of winter sun lit up a trolley of puddings. We chose a corner table with comfortable bench seats. Mrs Fox and I sat together with Joshua opposite. He chose things for us from the long menu. The last lunch this, perhaps, with Joshua, for ever. And yet, no feeling of frustration, no warning of sentimental tears. Instead, a surprising sensation of peace, like the unique luxury of stretching between sleep and wakefulness.