No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  Christine spent most of her time at Roger’s house up in her father’s bedroom talking to him. She told him everything about her marriage and her life in America – everything except the most important thing. She did not tell him that she could not shake off the depression that the loss of her baby had stabbed into her, nor that she and Vinson had reached the point when they both tacitly welcomed the opportunity to be apart for a while.

  The alsatian lay on the floor between them with his strong head on his black-nailed paws, lifting a yellow eye from one to the other. He had lost the bounce and ferocity with which he had scattered rugs and terrorized postmen at ‘Roselawn’. He did not like Farnborough. The rabbit scents of the sandy countryside meant less to him than the more urban trail of smells that other dogs had left for him on Barnes Common. Since his master had been ill nobody would take him out, because he pulled like a plough horse on the leash and there were too many cars on the shiny black roads to take him out without one. When he went into the garden there was always somebody to shout him off the flower-beds. The children were afraid of him, and he of them. He could not tell these things, but he showed them in his dull coat and lazy eye and his listless, almost sheepish manner. He and Mr Cope had both become older and milder, and it made Christine feel closer and more affectionate towards them both.

  When she asked her father how he liked living at Farnborough, he surprisingly, with his new gentleness, did not complain, although from a few unthinking remarks he let fall it was obvious that there were many things that did not please him.

  Roger and Sylvia, on the other hand, made no secret of the things that did not please them about having Mr Cope living there. Frankly, he and his dog were a nuisance to them, but since there was no alternative to the present arrangement there seemed to be no point in dwelling on its inconveniences. They did dwell on them, however, but in a martyred way, rejecting any alleviating suggestions, such as getting a nurse the next time Mr Cope was ill, as the doctor said he might be if the winter was a severe one. When Christine said tentatively: ‘Perhaps I could have him out to stay with me for a while’, Roger said: ‘God no, that would kill the old man.’

  Having a sister who lived in America had in no way mitigated his prejudice against that country. He lost no opportunity to jibe, and Christine found herself defending her adopted country with as much heat as she defended England if any American slighted it.

  Roger said that she had acquired an American accent, although she knew she had not. His new joke was to use what he thought was American slang, his idea of the transatlantic vernacular being culled from the earlier works of P. G. Wodehouse. He would say ‘Hot dog!’ or ‘Twenty-three skidoo! – as you say in America’, undeterred by Christine’s assurances that they did not. He laughed when she said radio instead of wireless, and nearly killed himself when he saw her use her knife and fork in the American way she had learned from Vinson.

  He still talked about Vinson as if he were an improbable joke. He insisted on calling him Gaegler, and the children, taking their tone from him, referred to their uncle as Gaegler too.

  When Roger asked Christine: ‘Where is the great Gaegler now?’ and she said ‘Coco Solo, Panama’, he bellowed with laughter, and the children chanted: ‘Coca-Cola! Coca-Cola!’ wild with glee.

  ‘Shut up, Champ and Boots,’ Roger said. ‘Stow it, troops. But I must say, Chrissie, it is a hell of a funny name. No one but the Yanks would have a naval station at a place with a name like that.’

  After she had been at Farnborough for several days Christine went up to London to stay with Rhona. Rhona had a new house in Hampstead, which was very grand, with a curving staircase and a manservant to open the door; but Rhona herself was quite unchanged and just as glad to see Christine as Christine was to see her.

  ‘I’ve sent Dan up to Gleneagles for a few days’ golf,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d have a better time without him. Darling, I am glad to see you. And you’ve got so thin! You look marvellous. I’d know that was an American dress anywhere. I like your hair too. Come upstairs and let’s start talking. We’ve got masses to say.’

  They fell back at once, as they always could, into the intimacy of their early youth. They talked for hours together. They went shopping, they went to the theatre, Rhona gave a cocktail party for people Christine knew, and everyone said how wonderful Christine looked, and admired her new figure, which was gratifying, but made Christine think she must have been fatter than she realized before.

  Geoffrey came to the cocktail party. He had a white scar across his left eyebrow where the hair would never grow again. It gave him a slightly quizzical air, which made his face look less negative than before. Christine was more glad to see him than she expected. When she had lived in England she had not cared whether she saw Geoffrey or not. He was too familiar, and he was always there for parties if you needed an extra man; but now she was glad to see him just because he was so familiar.

  Her life in America had been a succession of new impressions, overstimulating and tiring. Over there the unexpected was always happening. In England you knew what to expect, and could relax. She realized that although she had promised herself before her marriage that she would teach Vinson the English way of relaxing and letting things slide if they could not be helped, he had taught her instead the American way of getting tense and worried over things that did not merit the importance you gave to them.

  It was good to talk to Geoffrey in the familiar disrespectful language they had always used. He came to the party straight from the office in striped trousers and a stiff white collar over a blue shirt, and left a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella and a folded copy of The Economist in the hall. That was good too. It reminded you that, however far away you went to change and strange emotions, you could always come back and find England just the same.

  Rhona was just the same too, although she was full of all the new things that had happened to her. Christine enjoyed her stay in the pretentious comfortable house where a maid ran your bath and ironed your nightdress every day. It was a welcome change from Sylvia’s house at Farnborough, where fires were never lit until the evening and Sylvia was perpetually worrying about whether the meat had gone off or the maid had taken umbrage.

  Christine missed Vinson often. He had become a part of life that one could not shut out by going three thousand miles away, but at the same time she was glad that she was staying at Rhoda’s without him. Vinson would not have enjoyed the luxury. He was unnecessarily impressed by things like manservants and expensive china, but although he had only met Rhona once he had formed one of his censorious opinions about her. If they had been staying in the same house he would have pretended to be more prudish than he was and Rhona would have pretended to be more indecorous than she was, and Christine would have had a difficult time between them. Vinson would have been jealous of her friendship with Rhona, and Rhona would have been incredulous at her wifely submission to Vinson. It was better to be there alone. They would never have been able to talk like this if Vinson were there.

  Gossiping all day and half the night with Rhona, she realized how much she missed an intimate friend in America. Lianne and Nancy Lee had been companionable, but you could not make a real confidante in such a short time. You needed to grow up together as she and Rhona had done.

  Rhona was in love again. She had been in love twice since the Hungarian film director, but this time it was the real thing. She never went very far with any of her affairs, and she did not sincerely contemplate doing anything but spend the rest of her life with the complaisant Dan, but Dan annoyed her very much at times, and so she found other men to divert her.

  ‘It keeps you going,’ she said. ‘Being in love is a wonderful thing to keep you going.’

  ‘Yes, but doesn’t Dan-?’

  ‘Oh, he never knows. He’s always dashing about on some scheme to make five thousand pounds. He’s quite happy as long as I’m happy, and you know, I’m much nicer to him when I’ve got someone else on the stocks, so
I reckon that makes up for it.’

  Rhona’s ups and downs with the Hungarian and his successors took a lot of telling, but unlike Sylvia and Roger, she was just as eager to hear Christine’s news as to tell her own. Christine talked and talked and found that she was beginning to talk herself out of her depression. The things that she had brooded over alone because she could not tell them to anyone – especially not to Vinson – seemed much less when they were voiced and discussed with Rhona’s carefree philosophy. She told Rhona everything, and if Rhona did not understand some of the finer points she at least knew how to minimize their significance.

  ‘You worry too much,’ she said, ‘just like you always did. You’re taking this marriage business much too seriously.’

  ‘But, Ro, one must, if one’s to make it work.’

  ‘Oh, I know- but, all the same, you mustn’t mind things so much. Gosh, if I brooded every time I had a row with Dan I’d be broody all the time. Take a little look at some other man, why don’t you? I know you say Vin’s so jealous, but why not give him something to be jealous about? It would do him a power of good, and you too. A bit of outside attention would set you up no end.’

  ‘Oh, Ro, you know I never would. I don’t want to, anyway. That’s one of the best things about being married. You don’t have to go around any more looking at every frightful man to see if he’d possibly do.’

  ‘You could look just a little bit.’

  ‘You know I couldn’t.’

  ‘I know. You’re hopeless.’ They laughed together. Rhona was absurd. She never gave any advice worth taking, and yet the few days of talking and laughing with her did Christine far more good than any solemn discussion with someone who would take her problems seriously.

  Her depression began to lift. She prayed that it would not come back again when she got home to Arlington. She wished that she were not going back to the little house where she and Vinson had been unhappy. It would have been better to go somewhere new and start again. She did not ask herself whether she wanted to go back to America. She was going back. That was all.

  After she left Rhona she went to visit the book department at Goldwyn’s. She had often thought about going back there as a married woman who had escaped. She had planned how it would be. They would all be pleased to see her, would stare at her new clothes, would tell her spicy bits of gossip that had happened in the store while she had been away, would say: ‘Things are not the same as they were when you were here, Miss Cope -Mrs Gaegler, I mean.’

  She went there on a busy afternoon, and at first she could not see anyone she knew. They all seemed to be customers. No, there was Miss Burman, just the same as ever, with the same brown dress and the same wisp of grey hair that fell into her eye as she frowned over someone’s bill.

  Miss Burman was pleased to see Christine. ‘Well, look who’s here!’ she cried, throwing her wall-eye about at no one in particular. ‘My stars, you are a sight for sore eyes, Miss Cope -excuse me – Mrs Gaegler. That takes some getting used to. And how’s that handsome sailor boy of yours? That’s right, that’s right. Quite the yankee-doodle, aren’t you? Mother? Oh, she’s wonderful, thank you, dear. We had visitors to tea last week, and it tired her a little, but otherwise she’s – Oh yes, certainly, madam. Excuse me.’ She blushed, and hurried away to her waiting customer.

  Christine stood looking round her and feeling like a customer. The woman with the cut-away nostrils who had taken her place as head of the department sailed up on pointed feet and gave her a brief handshake and said that Oh yes, she liked the department very much, although of course she had done a lot of reorganizing since Christine had left.

  She went away and Christine stood for a moment vaguely, wondering if she had ever belonged here. Miss Burman had given her a nice welcome. She was just the same, but there was no Mr Parker, no Helen, no Alice, no Margaret, and the cookery books were where the collected editions of poets used to be. She wished she had not come.

  When she went to see Margaret she found her engrossed in her baby, and much happier than she had been before. She and Laurie were short of money certainly, as they had expected to be, but it did not seem to matter as they had expected it would. They were still managing to keep the ugly old house going. It was no more or less shabby than before. Laurie looked no more like a patient scarecrow in his clothes than he always had and Margaret looked just as neat and clean as ever.

  Christine had almost dreaded going to Margaret’s home, partly because she did not want to see anyone else with a baby, and partly because she was afraid that Timmy would not recognize her. She had thought about him so often, and it would be such a snub if he had forgotten her completely.

  He knew her at once. He was in the garden, and he heard her step on the pavement and rushed barking to the gate, flailing his tail and giving yelps of joy as Christine fumbled at the latch of the gate in her excitement to get in to him. Then she was in the garden, and Timmy was all over her – his tongue, his paws, his panting excitement – and she had to grasp his fur and hold him still so that she could wipe her silly tears off on his neck.

  Timmy never left Christine’s side all the time she was in Margaret’s house. ‘He’s afraid you’ll go away again without him,’ Margaret said. ‘Anyone would think we’d been cruel to him.’

  ‘Oh, Maggie, I know you’ve been wonderful –’

  ‘But he’s your dog,’ Laurie said in his slow, pondering way. ‘You can never take that away from them.’

  ‘Why don’t you take him back with you this time?’ Margaret said. ‘You could take him on the boat, and I believe they don’t have quarantine in America. They give them injections instead.’

  ‘If only I could …’ Christine thought of how the day before she left she had asked Vinson whether she could bring Timmy back with her. She asked it diffidently, almost timidly. She had thought about asking it for a long time, but dreaded hearing what he would answer.

  ‘I thought we’d settled all that,’ he said. ‘Do I have to say no to you all over again? What’s the point of bringing the animal over here when we may be gone from Washington soon? If they send me to the naval shipyard at Brooklyn we’ll probably be in an apartment.’

  ‘Oh, Vin, are they going to send you to Brooklyn? I don’t think I’ll like that. Nancy Lee says it’s horrible. Must we go there?’

  ‘My dear Christine,’ he said in his professional naval officer voice, ‘the United States Navy assigns its officers where it needs them, not where their wives happen to want to go.’

  When the time came for Christine to leave England she did not know whether she was glad or sorry. She wanted to see Vinson, but she did not like leaving her father, who had leaned on her during these weeks she had spent with him as he never had before. He looked so old and heavy-eyed, and she knew he was not happy at Farnborough. He had not been able to work for some time. Sylvia had packed away his dictionaries and manuscript paper and carefully sharpened pencils, and when he was not hunched in bed he pottered purposelessly about the place like a ghost that has lost its way and come to the wrong house to haunt. Christine had promised him that he should come to her in America when he was stronger, but although he said vaguely: ‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that’, she did not think he would ever get there. She wondered if she would ever see him alive again.

  It was not easy to leave England. Even a raw drizzly Sunday, with the undersized girls and pimply youths waiting in the rain for the cinemas to open, and the seedy coughing men waiting in doorways for the pubs to open, was a thing to be clung to because no Sunday was like it anywhere else in the world.

  At the same time she found she was looking forward to getting back to America. She had accepted it as her home now, and there were many things about it that she had missed. Cold all the time she was in England, she had missed the sensuous pleasure of opening a front door and stepping out of an icy wind into a warm bath of air. She missed her impeccable whitetiled bathroom and the shower which made it so easy to wash your hair. She missed the su
permarket, and the man making bacon-and-egg sandwiches at the lunch counter in the drugstore; the friendly familiarity of strangers on trains and buses, and the unrepressed chit-chat of salesgirls and young men who came to mend the refrigerator and told you their life’s ambitions. She missed the cars, the sweeping roads, the evening light on the white buildings of Washington, and Lincoln looking pensively into his watery mirror, with the golden reflection of the floodlit Monument coming across to meet him at night.

  She looked forward to getting back to Vinson. Without him she often felt alone, as she never had when she was single. His letters said that he missed her, and she knew that he weighed his letters carefully and never said in them what was not true. When they met, everything would be all right again perhaps. She would work to make it so. She wanted to get back to America to start again to make her marriage happy, yet she was half afraid lest she should fail and things should not be any better.

  And there would be Timmy to explain – Timmy, who was in a box in the guard’s van of the train which took her to Southampton. The last time she had travelled this way she had been crying and too unhappy to look out of the window. On this journey she looked out all the time, her eyes trying to hold the fleeting fields and hedges and naked elms, the garden plots dug neatly for the winter, a boy’s bicycle flung down with the wheels spinning, drably dressed people glimpsed on a shopping street as the train rushed over a bridge, because she did not know whether she would see England again.

  She was glad that she would have the boat trip before she met Vinson. It would give her time to get her thoughts straight. A nuisance about this friend of Laurie’s who would be on the boat.

  ‘He’s going to America to teach English,’ Margaret had said. ‘We’ve told him to look you up. Do be nice to him. He’s rather a dear.’