“Well, I don’t,” she said, “but I could guess. I went to a service at St. Paul’s and had dinner with my landlady. She made the goose and I was in charge of the vegetables: Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and braised parsnips. Afterwards we played canasta. Will that do?” She turned to smile at me. “Oh, Jig. Truly, everything from the time before I met you is a blur. I worked, I slept, I tried to get by.”
We were walking through St. James’s Park—it was nearly dusk but the pelicans were still drifting around on the lake—and I reached for her arm and said how lovely she looked. But later that week when I ran into the friends who had introduced us, I asked, casually I hope, how they knew Irene and learned that they had met her only a few weeks before the matinee; Irene had deftly managed to suggest a long friendship. I had been so charmed by her gaiety, and moved by the loss of her parents, that I hadn’t stopped to ask certain questions. Still, my doubts might have dissipated—Irene was excellent company—if in the course of procuring the marriage license, I hadn’t discovered she was twenty-nine, six years older than I’d thought.
Now, while my mother made one last attempt, I lit a second cigarette and struggled not to tell her everything. “Please, Jig,” she said. “I’ll pretend to be ill tomorrow, to save face. If you still feel the same about her in a year, I promise I’ll dance my shoes off at your wedding.”
She was looking at me beseechingly, and just for a moment I thought of Albert, the man who had shot himself. Then she did something inexpressibly touching. In her haste to talk to me she had not stopped even to remove her hairpiece which, although the artifice grew yearly more obvious, she still insisted on wearing. People wouldn’t know me without my falsie, she said, when my father or I suggested she leave it off. Now she raised her arms and began, one by one, to take out the pins that secured it. Sometimes, as a boy, she had let me do this for her.
But I was a successful businessman. I kept my doubts to myself and sent my mother away, carrying her switch of false hair. Next morning she was a model of good humour as she carried up a breakfast tray to Irene and acted as her lady’s maid. Irene had bought the dress from her shop and altered it herself. Henry performed the ceremony. The church was packed with parishioners and old friends, mostly mine.
We went to Paris for our honeymoon. I took Irene to the Gare de Lyon and we tried to find the café where Charles and I had met. For a while we wandered from square to square while I said maybe that’s it, or I think it was on a corner. At last we simply chose one. Over a glass of Calvados, Irene made me repeat the whole story. We came back to London and settled into a modest house she had found in Clapham. For almost two years our lives ran smoothly. Business was flourishing. We went to plays and dinners with friends and entertained in turn; there were holidays in Europe, riding and walking on the Downs. But soon after our son was born, in 1931, something happened; Irene became subject to bouts of melancholy. Or perhaps she no longer cared to conceal them. A nursemaid took care of Dennis, and Irene moved into the spare room. Increasingly, I stayed late at the office and dined alone.
The war cheered her up, perhaps in part because it allowed her to have a job again. To my surprise she refused to leave London or to let Dennis leave. He would go to school, per usual, and hide under his desk when the bombs fell. The Germans must be beaten and it was up to every man, woman, and child to do their part, whether it was piloting a Spitfire or saying multiplication tables. She herself drove a supply lorry and went for long walks around the city, heedless of the raids.
On March 12, 1941, the two of us, as seldom happened on a weekday, were both at home. I spent the morning in my study and emerged for a lunch of braised kidneys, boiled potatoes, carrots. We talked about whether to try to get a plumber to fix the leaky tap in the bathroom and what we should give Charles for his birthday. Afterward, Irene went out to the kitchen to make tea. The housekeeper had given notice in 1939 and it would have been unpatriotic, if not impossible, to replace her. I was reading the newspaper when her cry came.
“Oh, Jig, Jig, come quickly. Something dreadful has happened. I’ve taken poison.”
I called the doctor, I stuck my finger down her throat, I made her drink glass after glass of water and walk back and forth. Why, I kept asking. Why take poison? Why take it now?
She didn’t answer. Within an hour she was insensible. The doctor came and said there was nothing to be done. When Dennis arrived home from school, I told him, perhaps unwisely, what was happening and sent him to his room. She died shortly before midnight, making a noise like a door creaking on its hinges.
I don’t know how my mother guessed, but Irene had lost not one but two fiancés. The first, the great love, I learned when I searched her desk, was named Dennis; he and I had fought on the same stretch of the front for a few months. Fiance number two, a less well-documented figure, had worked in catering before he died of polio in 1923. If I could have spoken with complete frankness, I would have claimed that I no longer cared about Irene, that I stayed with her out of loyalty and propriety, but as I sat at her desk, with its neat pigeonholes spilling their secrets, I felt as if my world had once again turned upside down. All the little attentions she had paid me during our courtship, the ardor with which she gave herself to me on our wedding night, even her deceits—which I had interpreted as signs of affection—were, I now realised, evidence of experience and desperation.
The worst was yet to come. I had urged my parents not to attend the funeral; the journey took almost a day and I was not sure that, in their presence, I could maintain my composure. Charles and other old friends kept me company. By unspoken agreement we all just wandered off after the ceremony; there was no pretence of a drink or a meal. I was standing at the gate of the cemetery when an elderly couple, painstakingly smart, whom I had assumed were connected with the shop where Irene used to work, approached. “How do you do,” said the man; he had an English accent. “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Talbott.”
“How do you do,” I said.
“We’re Mr. and Mrs. Talbott,” he repeated. “Irene’s parents.”
I made a terrible fool of myself but I managed to stop just short of telling these pleasant upright people that they were dead. “I thought you were Welsh,” I said stupidly. It was the only safe comment that came to mind.
“On my father’s side,” said my father-in-law, with a sad smile. He handed me a card with their address.
I spent the night walking around London. Shortly after dawn I ended up by St. James’s Park. It was closed to the public, but walking along the Mall I could see the rows of vegetables and the stands of searchlights and antiaircraft guns. There was no sign of the pelicans. I was forty-three years old and a widower.
Two months after Irene’s death, my father decided, one pleasant May afternoon, to tackle a task that my mother nagged him about every spring: rolling the vicarage lawn in readiness for her croquet parties. The lawn was large and the roller was heavy. He pushed it back and forth for a couple of hours. Afterward he went to his study to work on his sermon and there my mother found him—his head resting on the desk—when she brought him his six o’clock sherry. Later she told me that the words of the sermon were smudged across his cheek. At the funeral the church was overflowing, every pew filled and latecomers lining the walls. A stranger was in the pulpit; his excellent eulogy only underscored my father’s absence.
My mother put aside her hairpiece and her cloak. Her vitality and humour failed her and she fell into self-pity. Three years later, after a trying month in hospital, she followed Henry. That was the word she used when I visited her the week before—I can’t wait to follow Henry—and even to me, whose faith had been worn threadbare in France, it seemed true. Now I am over eighty I wish I believed I was following someone.
Or that someone was following me in the right way. Dennis cannot know how eagerly both his mother and I awaited his arrival. How, at the sight of him, my eyes watered. How I rang Charles babbling and sent the most expensive telegram of my life to my parent
s. But Irene, as I’ve said, changed after his birth and my efforts to play with Dennis were often foiled by the nursemaid. When we did spend time together, I felt inept. I took him to the Natural History Museum, to see the Albert Memorial, to the zoo, but he had no interest in the things that I had enjoyed as a boy: birds, rocks, trees, swimming. And like his mother he had little sense of humour.
Then came Irene’s death and the subsequent revelations. I could not stop thinking about the day she killed herself and the day before she killed herself and the day before that. Had there been clues I missed? Was there something I could have done? I went through every piece of paper she left, every book and every garment, without finding an answer. Finally, a few weeks after my father’s funeral, I sent a note to her parents, asking if I might call on them. It was a crystalline summer’s day, and I kept thinking as I walked the half mile to their house how often Irene must have passed this way. How she too must have noticed the glorious red roses at number 41, the tall chimney pots across the road, the fox terrier with crooked ears at the house beside the pub.
Mr. Talbott opened the door before I could knock. The room into which he showed me was furnished with the same kind of heavy dark furniture we had at the vicarage. Mrs. Talbott brought in tea, and I realised that of course I should have brought my ration. I started to apologise but she said not to worry; they had extra that month. “Though not what you’re used to. It’s just from the corner shop.”
I assured her it was delicious. We talked about the weather and Mr. Talbott’s tomatoes. My first thought had been that Irene resembled neither of them, but as our conversation continued I saw she had her father’s colouring, her mother’s nose and chin. Presently I couldn’t stand it any longer. “I came to talk about Irene,” I said. “Why did she never introduce us?” Even in the depths of my self-absorption, I understood it would be too cruel to mention her lie.
Mrs. Talbott’s face twisted. “But how could she when she’d told you we were dead?”
“You knew?” In my amazement I turned from wife to husband. They nodded.
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Talbott. “Irene told us when she broke the news of her engagement. She didn’t know what to do. She’d blurted out the lie when she first met you and she couldn’t think of a way to take it back. We weren’t happy about it, not at all, but Jim and I didn’t know what to do either. It did seem the sort of thing that might make you have second thoughts. She made us promise not to call or telephone, but she was very good about visiting.”
“But why on earth would she tell such a lie in the first place?”
Mr. and Mrs. Talbott exchanged glances. His must have given permission for she continued. “Irene was always a fanciful girl. For a whole term she wouldn’t go to school because one of the other girls said she had a short neck. She fainted when we tried to make her. Then there was a period when she got it into her head that she was adopted. I know children sometimes think that, but Irene grew quite desperate. She kept demanding to be taken back to her real family. In the end I had to get the midwife, who delivered her, to have a word.”
As she spoke, I noticed she had Irene’s habit of wrinkling the bridge of her nose, though of course it was the other way round. When we were courting, I had teased her about it. “You try doing it,” she had said. Amid much laughter, I had found I couldn’t.
Mr. Talbott spoke up to say that Irene’s two sisters both lived nearby; they had three children apiece. “But even as a toddler, Irene was different. And then after the war—”
“I know she was engaged before we met,” I said quickly. “I just want to understand what happened.” What I really wanted to ask was did she love me? had she ever? The ambivalence I had felt throughout our marriage had vanished as I walked her round and round the living room.
Together, her parents described Dennis. He lived in the next street and the two of them had met in primary school. He was a nice boy, a gifted musician and mimic, and the only one who could talk sense to Irene. They had wanted to get married before he went to France, but both sets of parents thought they were too young. “When he was killed,” said Mrs. Talbott, “she felt she’d been left with nothing, not even widowhood. Then she started seeing that woman.”
That woman was a medium who claimed to be in contact with Dennis. They had done everything they could to dissuade her. The doctor had talked to her, and the vicar, but she didn’t listen. “She might look like a slip of a girl,” said Mr. Talbott, “but she had a will like Napoleon’s. That’s why she moved into lodgings, because she thought we were interfering.”
“And is that why she killed herself?” I said. “Because of Dennis?”
“Heavens, no.” Mrs. Talbott shook her head for emphasis. “She had everything to live for: you, her son, a lovely home. Once or twice,” she added shyly, “when we knew you were away, we walked past.”
Suddenly I was saying, much too loudly, “She pretended you were dead. She bought poison. She took it when I was in the next room.
The Talbotts couldn’t have been nicer. They brought me more tea, a sip of precious brandy. Mr. Talbott walked home with me. A week later a letter came. “Ever since your visit we’ve been thinking about Irene. I wish we could give you a clear answer—she’d learned she was ill, or she was worried about her sanity—but the only thing we can come up with is that, after the terrible shock, we weren’t surprised and her sisters weren’t either. Irene was never on easy terms with life. When you got married, we thought she’d put the past behind her. But having a baby seemed to set her nerves off again. And of course the war. Sometimes she used to walk over here in the middle of a raid. Perhaps she was hoping a bomb would settle the matter.”
I should have stopped then but I didn’t. I tried to find the medium Irene had gone to and when she turned out to have died (even mediums apparently do die), I went to another one, a widow who lived in Peckham. Mrs. Langham was stout and gray-haired and wore a gold watch pinned to her bosom, all of which gave me confidence. This was no hysterical waif of a girl, starving herself into fits and fantasies. I became a regular at the weekly meetings in her parlour. Oddly, they reminded me of nothing so much as the war. The dark room, smelling of candle snuff and incense with the bodies crowded around the table, was reminiscent of my dugout. And of course we had lived in a welter of superstition. If you see the enemy lighting a cigarette then you’re safe. If you break both shoelaces, you’re doomed.
Irene didn’t appear immediately, but Mrs. Langham started to get messages. “Soon, she says, soon,” she would report, which seemed typical of Irene, unreliable even in death. Then she began to visit. She talked about Dennis (it wasn’t always clear which one) and about her parents. She said she loved me. Whenever I asked about the arsenic, she sobbed that I’d never understood her.
I say she and her as if I believed that I was talking to Irene, and for a while I did. Then one day, we were trying to contact the brother of a young woman named Louise—he had died of TB two years before—and suddenly I grasped that I was holding the damp hand of a hysterical girl and the rather dry, calloused one of an accountant (Vernon, who’d lost his mother), and I could see that the whole racket was driven by us, by our grief and longing. Mrs. Langham was a good listener and clever at picking up hints about the deceased, but she was not a conduit to some vigorously peopled afterlife. I dropped Louise and Vernon’s hands and left the room. The next day was Sunday, and for the first time in several years I went to church. Thank God my parents were not alive to see how low I’d fallen, though if they had been, if I had been able to draw on my father’s robust intelligence, my mother’s sympathy and humour, I like to think I never would have entered Mrs. Langham’s dining room.
The war ended, the railways were nationalised, and I retired to the Lake District. Even without my parents, the familiar landscape was the only thing I could think of that might make me feel less melancholy. I was convinced that my life was over in every way that mattered. One day, walking in the hills, I met a boy carrying a bi
rd. He had found the kestrel lying under a gorse bush with a broken wing. When he said his father would probably make him wring its neck, I offered to take it home. Boadicea recovered, and that was the beginning of the second part of my life. I took up falconry. The birds brought me friends; I renewed relations with some of my father’s parishioners. For many years I kept company with one of my neighbours, a strong, intelligent woman whom I know my mother would have liked. On the half dozen occasions when I proposed, she said it would be absurd from the point of view of our taxes.
And what about Dennis? Sadly, he and I have never had the closeness I enjoyed with my father. In several respects he did not get the best start in life, but other people have had worse starts and managed better. After Irene’s death the two of us rattled around with a housekeeper, the aptly named Mrs. Quick, who made Dennis do his homework and both of us eat our carrots. Presently Charles took me aside and suggested that, if I weren’t going to remarry, I should send the boy to boarding school. So I did. Week after week, I received a dutiful letter. Once I laid out ten of them, side by side; barring differences in weather and food, they were almost identical. I knew he wasn’t happy. He was poor at games and a mediocre student. My only hope was that he was too much of a nonentity to be bullied. He followed in my footsteps to Clare College and studied history.
Up until the age of twenty, Dennis was the boy no one remembered. Had he played on the house football team? Was he the third courtier in Hamlet, or the fourth? He slipped through life well-nigh invisible. And then, the summer before he finished at Cambridge, he came to visit me in the Lake District. From the moment he stepped off the train and loped down the platform calling “Dad,” I knew he had changed. He was accompanied by two equally loud young men. He told me he’d taken up golf and might get a blue; his companions were also keen golfers. That night after dinner when Lucy, the maid, served coffee, I saw her dodge his wandering hands. He and his friends spent the week either on the golf course or making a nuisance of themselves at the pub. When he graduated, without the blue, Dennis got a job managing a golf course near York. Once again he followed my dubious example and married a shopgirl.
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