No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  While a woman with false bosoms was crooning, Hubert announced that Miss Something did not feel well and was going to be taken home. He got up with her in the middle of a song and people shushed at the disturbance they made.

  Geoffrey did not want to go. He was slumped against the back of the seat with his receding chin on his crumpled shirt front, and might or might not have been asleep. When the cabaret was over Christine pinched him and suggested going home. He sat up, said: ‘God no, the night is young’, took a gulp of whisky and slumped back again. Christine felt too tired and hazy to stir him up again. She sat in the dark with her elbows on the table and a lot of smoke in her eyes and let her thoughts drift. Presently she was aware that a man at the next table was talking to her.

  She smiled and shook her head, not hearing all that he was saying to her. He had dark, ungreased hair and the kind of small wrinkled face that never properly matures, but looks at any age only like a boy grown old. He was wearing a grey flannel suit and an Old Harrovian tie. He looked like hundreds of men you might meet in London, and quite safe.

  Geoffrey’s mouth fell open. He was asleep. The man in the Old Harrovian tie put his hand on Christine’s knee. She removed it. She did not know how it came about, but then they were on the dance floor, and the man did not dance very well, and he held her in an excited way and laid his cheek against the side of her head.

  He kissed her hair. Was it rather romantic? Christine wished she had not drunk so much, because she could not decide whether it was romantic or not; but if she had not drunk so much she would not be dancing with an unknown, excitable man and not really caring what happened next.

  When the music stopped, the man took her hand and pulled her off the floor into the dim little lobby where the stairs led up to the street. ‘Wait there, my sweet,’ he said, and disappeared through a door.

  Christine leaned against the wall and thought that when you were a little drunk it was your will-power that went first. You were a tool of fate, content to slide along with the drift of events. When the man came back she stared through him without recognition, because it had been dark at the table, and on the floor, where it was lighter, she had danced so close to him that she had never properly seen his face. He was smaller than she expected. He came close to her, and she recognized his touch and the texture of his suit. Ah yes, there was the Old Harrovian tie. She was static, waiting to see what would happen next.

  ‘Let’s go out and get some air,’ he said. ‘Come on. Please, darling.’

  Was this the way a great love affair started? Christine wondered, making the usual mistake between love and alcohol. But I don’t really do this kind of thing, she thought, following him obediently up the stairs. Perhaps it’s time I did.

  In the street, he said: ‘Let’s go on up to the Blue Angel. It’s much more fun than this joint.’ It had been raining. He put his arm round her waist and they walked along Oxford Street with the lights pooling red, yellow, green all down the vista of wet road, and scarcely any traffic to obey them.

  He was not much taller than she was. His voice was clear and arrogantly typical of his class, but with a throbbing undertone of excitement that was communicating itself to Christine. Here I am, she thought. Picked up, and in for an adventure, perhaps.

  The shop lights were all turned off. Suddenly, he pushed her into a doorway and kissed her as gracefully and successfully as if they had been before a film camera.

  She did not mind. But that was dreadful of her. What was she doing? What was happening? He moved in on her and a doorknob pressed into her back. He kissed her again with less finesse and more intent, and she broke free, pushed past him out of the doorway and ran back towards the night-club, her head going faster than her feet, so that it seemed she must topple forward. The man did not follow her.

  When she went down into the cavern again they were still playing the same rumba that had been clicketing in her ears when she followed the man up the stairs. Geoffrey was still sitting in the same position. He had not noticed that she had been away.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, waking him up. ‘Let’s go home, Geoffrey. It’s terribly late.’

  He felt better after his sleep. He went quite amiably out with her, collected his coat and the excessive black homburg that he wore in the middle of his small head, and did a little senseless joking with the hat-check girl, who had to earn her living in black net tights and a top-hat. Christine tried to hurry him, because she was afraid the man would come back. In the street, she looked quickly up and down before she darted across to the car, although even now she did not know that she would recognize him if she saw him.

  She got into the driver’s seat, not trusting to Geoffrey, but he got in at the same side and pushed her over. ‘My dear cousin,’ he said.

  He drove quite carefully out to Barnes, grumbling all the way about the distance. He was such a bore. Christine wished now that she had gone with the man in the Old Harrovian tie. She often wished that she were the sort of girl who had adventures. Now she had turned one down. But it had been a small adventure, all the same, something to tell Margaret about. Margaret was not shocked at things that other people did, even though she would not have done them herself.

  She would share with Margaret the fact that someone had found her attractive enough to pick up. Not being a natural pick-up, she did not know that you did not have to be especially attractive – you just had to be a woman – to get picked up by a half-drunk man in a dark night-club.

  She felt excited when she thought about what might have happened to her that evening. She had missed her chance-of what? She sighed. Her bosom felt large and voluptuous and her waist very small. She wished she were driving with someone who would make love to her when the car stopped. Geoffrey was surely the biggest bore in the world. When he was in his car he thought of nothing else. Not that she would let him kiss her if he was silly enough to try. The thought made her giggle.

  ‘You drank too much tonight,’ Geoffrey told her censoriously.

  ‘So did you.’

  ‘My dear child.’ He sighed. ‘When you can hold your liquor as well as me, you’ll have something to be proud of.’ He turned in at the soft side-road that led to ‘Roselawn’ with a skidding sweep.

  ‘The outposts of Empire,’ he said as he stopped outside her home.

  ‘Coming in for a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ve got miles to go back,’ he said, trying to make her feel bad about living so far out. His side of the family, with their money and their house in Regent’s Park, had always rather looked down on the Copes, and been known to explain them away at parties as ‘my suburban relations’.

  The Copes thought Geoffrey and his excitable widowed mother very silly, and explained him away as ‘he can’t help being like that’.

  He would not see her to the door. He never did. Christine said good-bye to him in the car, and then remembered.

  ‘Geoffrey, I haven’t got a key. I forgot to ask Aunt Josephine.’

  ‘You’ll have to wake her up then.’ He switched on the ignition.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Three o’clock.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t. She hates being woken up, and Daddy probably wouldn’t answer, even if he heard me. He’d think it was burglars at last. Come with me and let’s see if there’s a window open somewhere.’

  ‘You don’t need me. You know the house better than I do.’

  ‘I can’t go prowling round on my own. Suppose a policeman came? Look, you must. One doesn’t just leave a girl to break into a house by herself.’

  The man in the Old Harrovian tie would have thought it fun to do it with her. They would have crept about in the dark holding hands, and he would have pressed her against the wall of the house and kissed her. She could imagine the ivy cushiony and damp at her back.

  She shivered. ‘Please, Geoff, come and help me.’

  ‘Oh, all right, all right.’ Grumbling, he twisted his long legs out of the car, stood up and stretched in
the sandy road and yawned vastly at the night.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Christine, taking his arm. ‘You’ll wake the dogs, then there’ll be hell to pay. Come on.’

  He staggered a little going up the path. He was not as sober as he thought. He followed Christine all round the house on exaggerated tiptoe, cursing when he put his foot into a flowerbed. They tried the back door and all the lower windows with no success.

  ‘The landing window,’ Christine whispered, looking up from the front door. ‘The one half-way up the stairs. They sometimes forget to lock that. Look, if I stand on your shoulders I could reach it.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Geoffrey, tripping over an iron hoop that was meant to keep dogs off the bulbs. ‘My God no, a great girl like you. You’ll break my back.’

  ‘You’re so rude,’ said Christine. She giggled. This was rather fun. She kicked off her shoes, made Geoffrey clasp his hands in front of him, stood on them teetering, with his face pressed into her skirt, put one foot on his shoulder and tried to put the other foot up as well, holding on to the ivy and the tiny gable above the front door.

  He staggered, crumpled and collapsed to the ground with her on top of him. He pushed her off roughly and stood up, brushing off his clothes. The situation affronted him.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ring the bell.’ He looked sillier than ever with his oiled hair standing up in spikes.

  ‘No, please –’ She caught his arm. ‘Don’t. If Aunt Josephine wakes in the night she never gets to sleep again, and then she’ll have a headache all tomorrow, and it’s her day for the Putney Incurables.’

  ‘As if they hadn’t got enough to bear without that crazy old woman –’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Christine, ‘and do something. If you put your foot on that bit of iron sticking out of the bricks there, you could stand up and reach the window.’

  ‘So could you.’

  ‘I’m not tall enough. You are. Or don’t you think you could make it? You’re afraid you’ll tumble down, I suppose.’

  ‘God damn it,’ said Geoffrey, his voice in his nose, ‘I am not afraid. I’m just bloody well fed up with fooling around here with you when I ought to be in bed.’

  He was so cross that he wrenched off his coat and threw it on the ground without worrying whether it got dirty. He put one narrow shoe on the rusty iron peg which once supported the wistaria that Christine’s mother had loved, clutched the gable, hoisted himself up with a grunt that was more like a squeak, and got his hands on the window-sill. He stood there, one foot waving behind him in the air, and his body flattened against the house.

  ‘Can you open it?’ asked Christine, wanting to laugh.

  ‘I could, if I could let go with one hand,’ he gasped, clinging on desperately.

  ‘Of course you can. It’s easy.’

  ‘Oh, it’s easy, is it? All right -’ He shifted his weight, raised one hand to the bar of the sash window, and at that moment there came a swelling roar from inside the house and the alsatian hurled itself, all teeth and claws, against the inside of the window. Geoffrey shrieked, waved his hand wildly, leaned backwards and fell with whirling arms and legs at Christine’s feet, half on the path, half in the flowerbed.

  When the bolts and chains of the front door shot back and Christine’s father and aunt appeared in the light from the hall, he holding the alsatian by its chain collar, she holding a torch and the front of her peignoir, Christine was kneeling on the gravel, dabbing at the gaping cut on Geoffrey’s eyebrow with the skirt of her dress. She felt cold with fear, yet resigned already to the emergency that life had suddenly become. It had happened. Something awful had happened. Geoffrey was unconscious and badly hurt, and the night was broken into crisis and cries and all sorts of breathless, bustling things to do.

  They got him inside and laid him on the sofa. He was like a figure stuffed with sawdust and his silly face was leaden. Aunt Josephine was stanching the wound with pillowslips from her mending basket, her big face noble, as if she were saving a bleeding soldier hero with strips torn from her petticoat.

  Mr Cope wanted to do something. He got out the brandy. Christine came back from telephoning the doctor just in time to see him trying to force the neck of the bottle into Geoffrey’s dead-looking mouth.

  She had never noticed that Geoffrey had false teeth. He must have a very good dentist, she thought absently, as she pulled back her father’s arm. ‘Don’t give him that!’ she cried.

  ‘First aid,’ he said, surprised. ‘Always give ‘em brandy. I thought you’d been a nurse.’

  ‘The only thing I remember from it is that you never give stimulants to a patient with a head wound. He may have a fractured skull or compression of the brain or something. Oh Daddy, isn’t it awful?’

  She wanted to be comforted, because it was her fault. She put her hand on her father’s arm, which felt soft and fat under the silk of his pyjamas.

  He stiffened, as he always did if you tried to caress him. He turned away and poured a glass of brandy for himself. ‘God knows, I need it,’ he said, as if he were the only one who had had a shock.

  The alsatian was still snarling and prowling round the room, giving off sudden throaty barks, to show that its outrage was not yet appeased.

  ‘Can’t you shut that animal up?’ Christine asked, coming back with a hot-water bottle to put under the rug that covered Geoffrey. ‘It’s all his fault, anyway. He made Geoffrey fall.’

  ‘He was only doing his job,’ said her father, ‘and I must say, apart from what’s happened, I’m glad of the showing he made.’

  ‘You’re glad!’ Aunt Josephine looked up. ‘When here’s that poor Geoffrey bleeding to death on your sofa.’

  ‘He’s not bleeding to death. You’ve stopped the blood, like the sensible woman you are. And he’s coming round now, anyway. Look at him.’

  ‘No wonder, with the noise you and that dog are making. Go up and put on your dressing-gown before the doctor comes.’

  ‘I will not go up. I’m perfectly decent.’

  They were still arguing when the doctor arrived; not their own family doctor, but a cavernous, monosyllabic man, who had just been climbing wearily into bed after a confinement when the summons from ‘Roselawn’ caught him.

  Geoffrey was fully conscious by now, not fussing, but appearing to accept the situation without surprise. The doctor took some things out of his bag, went away to wash his hands and came back to take scissors and needles and silk out of the sterile cases that Christine opened for him. She tried to do things for him without being asked, efficiently, to show she had been a nurse, but it was not like it had been in hospital. It was quicker and more casual. In hospital there would have been a tremendous boiling-up of sterilizers, and people rushing about with trolleys and sterile towels and kidney dishes. The doctor simply threaded a needle, squared his elbows and bent over Geoffrey. He had not even taken off his overcoat.

  ‘You’re not going to stitch him up without an anaesthetic?’ asked Aunt Josephine.

  ‘He won’t feel it. He’s drunk as a goat.’ Geoffrey grinned foolishly, as if at a compliment. Aunt Josephine looked startled, and then stared at Christine and gave her one of her awkward winks that did not fit in with her long solemn face.

  Mr Cope said: ‘Oh’, and walked away. He was more shocked at Geoffrey being drunk than at him being stitched up without an anaesthetic. He did not watch the stitching. The other two did, and while they were getting Geoffrey to bed in the spare room that looked over the garden at the back, Mr Cope went to his own room and locked the door loudly, as a sign that he cared for no more disturbance that night.

  ‘You’ve had quite a lot to drink too, haven’t you?’ Aunt Josephine asked Christine, looking across the bed as they tucked the blankets round Geoffrey’s cold feet.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’

  Christine looked at Geoffrey. He was asleep. ‘Not very,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I never thought you woul
d. That’s the finish of that dress, anyway,’ said Aunt Josephine, looking at the blood on Christine’s skirt. ‘I’ll take my roses now, if you’ll just unpin them.’

  Christine looked down guiltily. ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she said. ‘They’re not spoiled.’ She gave them to her aunt.

  ‘Yes, thank goodness,’ said Aunt Josephine, carrying them carefully out of the room like a bridal posy. ‘They escaped disaster. They looked lovely on you. You shall wear them again some time if you like.’

  Christine kissed her aunt on the landing. She felt she should say something. ‘Sorry,’ she said brusquely, jerking her hand towards the spare-room door. ‘Sorry about all this.’

  ‘Gracious me,’ said Aunt Josephine easily. ‘It adds a spice to life.’ She went into her room and Christine heard her talking to the puppy which was sleeping on her bed.

  In her bedroom, Christine did not feel tired or sleepy. She stepped out of the ruined dress, threw away her laddered stockings and dawdled over creaming her face and doing her hair. What a night, she thought. What a night. She sat up in bed and went over the events of the evening, and she remembered the kiss in the doorway more clearly than the details of what had happened with Geoffrey.

  She had forgotten to look at the picture of herself and Jerry at the Commemoration ball at Oxford. She got out of bed again and took out the picture from where it was rolled up with her old school photographs in the bottom drawer of her desk. Kneeling, she spread it on the floor and put a hand on each end to keep it flat. There he was, Jerry, rumpled and unshaven.

  When you kissed me, in those days, it wasn’t anything like tonight in the doorway. You were so innocent, only I didn’t know it, because I was too. None of those other Canadians in the ice-hockey team can have been like you were. When you got a bit carried away, like that time in the hay barn at Jennifer’s, you used to say afterwards: ‘Forgive me, darling’ and be afraid that I minded.