Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  I couldn’t tell Henry I had not made love with a man before because I didn’t want Ann to know. Short of that, any reason for refusing seemed to me hurtful. So we made love through the night before Ann arrived, an experience curious and not unpleasant but for me without any of the intensity of feeling I had had briefly with Ann, briefly with Roussel.

  When we met her and the children the next day, she was very much closed into herself. In the two days left, she stayed aloof and sad. She wouldn’t answer my questions, nor had she any for me. I wondered if her being pregnant again might explain her mood, but I felt bewildered and afraid for her.

  Only last spring Susan said to me, “Mother said you had an affair with Dad. I thought, how sad for her, how absolutely alone she must have felt.”

  “I was in love with your mother,” I said.

  Ann had had too many long and bitter years to reshape the past into cruelties to her. Yet perhaps at the time it did hurt her. I was too young to know that, particularly in sexual matters, people can say a lot that they don’t mean, often without knowing it. I still thought Ann was wiser than other people out of her own complex experience and her quick intuitions.

  Ann with the children took me to the airline terminal where we met Dr. Pope, her sister and her children. I felt like a patient horse in a pony ring, children climbing all over me, urging me into exploring the terminal. I was glad to have farewells done with.

  We were flying first class. It was like a long leisurely dinner party for just the two of us, and we had more to say than the long flight could accommodate. It was a great relief to me to be with only one person I cared about, on whom I could concentrate with simple pleasure. Once we arrived, I would have to juggle time for Ellen, even more importantly for Roussel, but at the moment Dr. Pope and I were in balanced excitement.

  When Roussel joined us for that first evening of dinner and the theatre, I realized how terribly difficult the summer was going to be. She and Dr. Pope got on easily enough as I expected they would with so many interests in common, and Roussel treated me with the natural affection of a friend. But we were in love. We’d had only one weekend together and had been waiting months to see each other again.

  I had already talked with Dr. Pope about our not living in each other’s pockets. It was easy enough for me to get away for a couple of hours every other morning, if only for a walk in the park, and Roussel’s room was only a three-ha’penny bus ride away. But our time was too hurried and clandestine. Roussel tried to be patient, but she complained that we had time to make love but never to talk.

  She was worried about the exams she had written, sure she hadn’t achieved a first, which was her only hope of going on to graduate school. She had applied for a fellowship in Iowa for a year and wondered if that was an academic detour that would give us only a crowded Christmas holiday together with my family. She wouldn’t know the exam results until August.

  There were too many uncertainties, too many decisions to make in the half dark. Roussel was trying to get some work done and give some time to her parents while she also tried to accommodate my schedule, being in London when I was. She was going to be at Stratford with us where Evaline Wright was also joining us.

  “But that will help,” I reassured her.

  Roussel gave me an amused, skeptical look.

  Dr. Pope’s delight in everything we did made the tension I was under a light burden in those first days in London. I was distracted enough by Roussel to be not at first very conscious of a new dependence Dr. Pope felt and felt fearfully. Once other friends of hers proposed to take her on a day’s outing. Unthinkingly they arranged to take the tube. Escalators were one thing Dr. Pope couldn’t manage. She was back at the hotel in an hour just as I was getting ready to meet Roussel.

  “I’m a fool and a coward,” she said.

  “They’re fools!” I shouted, murderous of people so stupid.

  “You keep shielding me from things,” she said.

  “I’m not shielding you from anything. I just make plans that work.”

  “I’m going out shopping,” she announced, “alone.”

  I couldn’t go on with my own day, stayed at the hotel and waited until she got home.

  “I even took a bus!” she announced triumphantly.

  But we both knew it was a risk she shouldn’t have taken. She was so small, so uncertain of her balance, so slow that even the crowds on the sidewalk were dangerous for her.

  Being physically imaginative for her was no difficulty for me. It was simply an extension of what I had done at college. I ordered taxis to come back for us at the end of a theatre evening in Oxford or Cambridge so that we wouldn’t have to walk to find one. When we had a fast train connection, which often meant climbing over a high footbridge of the sort I’d fallen on in Stratford, I arranged for the porter to take Dr. Pope across the tracks on the luggage van. In all such circumstances, she was gallant and amused, but, as they accumulated, she felt the loss of her independence.

  She wanted to do things for me, wash out underwear, adjust my reading light, give me the aisle seat at the theatre. Such attentions, particularly in public, embarrassed me, and I often tried to joke her out of them.

  “Everyone’s saying ‘Look at that great lout of a girl taking the best seat!’ ”

  “They think my leg brace doesn’t hinge, and I should stick it out in the aisle. Why shouldn’t you have the legroom you need?”

  Dr. Pope seemed to me essentially so strong and independent a spirit that I didn’t really understand her frustration at my doing things for her. I was impatient with her concern that she was too much a burden. I, of course, enjoyed making each adventure possible for her. She gave me so much each day of her knowledge and her pleasure that I felt as much nourished as I always had in her presence.

  She was also uncertain of the propriety of some things I suggested, like having drinks in our room.

  “Surely it’s as proper as two women having drinks in a public bar, and it’s a lot cheaper.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t a little sordid?”

  I joked and teased, but in such matters she didn’t trust my judgment and was uncertain of her own.

  When Evaline Wright joined us at Stratford, she was a real grown-up and world traveller whose advice Dr. Pope could trust. We were given her permission to go on drinking in our room, where she joined us. Miss Wright proposed a day trip Roussel and I had done the summer before.

  “I don’t want to go if you don’t,” Dr. Pope said.

  I realized she was speaking out of loyalty to me, having no reason to think I longed for time alone with Roussel. Reassured that I’d like a day to catch up on letters, she went off happily enough.

  Roussel couldn’t throw off a sense of inhibition as quickly as I could and she never trusted the privacy of the out of doors, quite reasonably since tourists turned up everywhere. We didn’t fight, but we had to deal with my recklessness and her caution. In Stratford particularly, where the landscape seemed to me to belong to us, I hated to waste an hour, for again Roussel would be leaving while Dr. Pope, Miss Wright and I went on to Oxford and Cambridge.

  MY CHOICE OF ACCOMMODATION in Oxford was a mistake. We were over a mile from the town, and the guest house was mainly a permanent home for old people with several rooms to rent to transients. Miss Wright was given a room she claimed was a not-quite-converted broom closet, and ours, though large enough, was threadbare and dusty.

  “Don’t go around in this room barefooted,” Miss Wright admonished me as she joined us for a before-dinner drink.

  The dining room was of the sort in which no one speaks, afraid of interrupting the conversation among the knives and forks. Only the loud, cheerful Irish maid broke the silence with her shouts down the voice tube to the kitchen. “Three soups, one of which is for Miss Garrett” and “Five dinners, one of which is for Miss Garrett.”

  In the lounge for coffee, Miss Garrett introduced herself to us. She was an ancient Canadian scholar who went hom
e for wars. An honorary fellow of Magdalen College, she asked if she could show us around. We agreed readily enough, and she gave us an informative tour of her college. When she offered to take us punting, Dr. Pope declined. Even Miss Garrett’s assurance that she was accomplished not only in a punt, but in a canoe, a skill learned from her girlhood in the Canadian north woods, would not persuade Dr. Pope to change her mind.

  The next evening at coffee, Miss Garrett again introduced herself and offered to show us Magdalen. We made our uneasy excuses. Miss Garrett’s memory for the present was quite gone. Each day she went to the library and was given the same book to read and take notes on.

  “What is it about her meals?” Evaline finally asked the maid.

  “She doesn’t like white sauces or custard.”

  I hadn’t the nerve to say, “Make it ‘two of what is for Miss Garrett from now on.’ ”

  The food was negatively memorable.

  After our first night at the theatre, we came back to a house without lights. On the table by the stairs was a lighted candle, sitting in a dish of water, with a sign, “Light your candle from me, but don’t blow me out.” Surrounding it were candles in holders for us to take to bed.

  “Where did you find this place?” Miss Wright hissed, as we slowly climbed the stairs in the flickering light.

  I took Dr. Pope to call on Professor Dyson, whom I had met the summer before at Stratford. We went to his fifteenth-century rooms at eleven in the morning where he uncorked Spanish sherry and broke the cork.

  “Which means,” he said cheerfully, “we must finish the bottle.”

  Professor Dyson collected first editions, and he showed us a number of his rarest specimens. Then he took Dr. Pope’s own book on Paradise Regained from his shelves and asked her if she’d honour him by signing it.

  As we went back down the shallow, worn steps of that ancient building, Dr. Pope seemed to float.

  “I am in Oxford,” she said. “I am a scholar among scholars.”

  Her wonder touched me, but it also separated her from me, for I knew then very clearly how claustrophobic I was becoming in such beautiful rooms into which only the scholarly present were allowed. No novel or book of poems less than a hundred years old was worthy of a place there unless, of course, it had been written by a friend, Auden or Charles Williams, or C.S. Lewis. I was physically as well as intellectually restless, longed to hike, to go out on the river, to play like the young animal I was.

  I did occasionally take an afternoon to myself even when Roussel was too far away to join me.

  “Why don’t you tell Libby where you’re going?” Miss Wright asked one day.

  “I often don’t know myself,” I answered, which was true enough in Oxford.

  “She thinks you’re meeting someone,” Miss Wright said.

  “If I were, it’s no business of hers. She isn’t on this trip as my chaperone.”

  “She’s very dependent on you, and she worries,” Miss Wright said.

  “Oh, I do know that,” I said.

  “You’ve been very good to her and very patient. It can’t always be easy.”

  It was a kind-enough invitation for me to unburden myself of my own problems, and I didn’t mistrust Miss Wright, nor did I mind that Dr. Pope talked with her. But I really didn’t need to talk. It would exaggerate difficulties which seemed to me manageable.

  Miss Wright didn’t go with us to Samson Agonistes, performed out of doors in the quadrangle of one of the colleges. Though too static for real theatre, the play was directed with lively imagination. When the sound of the crumbling temple was played over the PA system, it was hard not to believe the towers of the surrounding buildings were not falling on us.

  The cab I had asked to return for us didn’t materialize. We were directed to a cab rank several blocks away on the main road. Dr. Pope set out, uncomplaining, for she was absolutely self-disciplined about any physical challenge. Drunken soldiers from the nearby American base tried to pick us up. I was furious with the cab driver who had deserted us, furious that Dr. Pope had to walk such a distance, and those young drunks, offering to seduce rather than help us, got the full brunt of my anger.

  “You know, you’re kind of cute,” one of them said to her, “but I don’t like your big, mean friend.”

  We did finally get a cab, and it was Dr. Pope who comforted me while she put Band-Aids on her saddle sores.

  In London, Roussel often joined us for dinner just moments after we’d parted at her room. She was reserved enough never to slip in making references to our time alone together. For me, it was so much an effort that I grew more and more on guard.

  At the theatre, Dr. Pope more often watched my face than the stage, wanting to be sure I was enjoying myself. I was aware that the habit irritated me more because I would have enjoyed such concentration from Roussel, who went to the theatre to see the play. When Ellen was with us, I was conscious of how little she existed for either Dr. Pope or Roussel.

  Ellen joined us for a weekend when we were in Bath. Though our hotel was satisfactory, the food was very good—I ate duck every night we were there—the time there had been disappointing. I did not share Dr. Pope’s admiration for the eighteenth century.

  “A row house is a row house, whether it’s built in a curve or in a straight line,” I said.

  Nor was I her eager companion exploring the Roman baths and other sites familiar to Jane Austen enthusiasts.

  “Are you trying to ruin this for me?” she demanded.

  No, no, I really wasn’t. We were both relieved when Wells Cathedral delighted me.

  But I was so angry with Dr. Pope for addressing not a single remark to Ellen the whole weekend she was with us that I confronted her with her rudeness.

  “Well, I suppose I’m simply so much more interested in what you have to say,” was her defence.

  I was not flattered by it. I felt like a cat in a gunnysack.

  By the time we arrived in Cambridge, the tension was unrelieved. Miss Wright, who had joined us again, though she was staying in another hotel, suggested I walk her home one evening and then invited me in for a drink.

  “You’re discouraged, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “I’m ashamed of how impatient I get,” I confessed. “I really did want it to be a perfect summer for her.”

  “It is,” Miss Wright said, “as much as it can be.”

  Just before we were about to leave, Dr. Pope’s leg brace broke. We had to get to the orthopaedic hospital in London to have it fixed. She would not let me go with her, made her own way out to a cab on the frail, unguarded leg, carrying the brace. She was determined not to allow her handicap to be my responsibility, yet how much easier it was to deal with that than to cope with her emotional dependence.

  Be patient, I counselled myself. Be patient, Roussel encouraged. It’s not much longer, Ellen reminded me, and we’ll be free. I realized she was positively looking forward to the trip on the Continent. I looked ahead only to the week Roussel and I would have alone together before she left for the States.

  I was forward-looking enough, however, to know I must buy a bicycle. I had used up all my own purchasing coupons. Miss Wright volunteered her own. She would impersonate my mother. Her hair newly done for the occasion, she set out with me to a department store. In the cycle department, she was my disapproving, only half-resigned parent, since I didn’t know enough about the world for the trip I was proposing, speaking no foreign language adequately, being an indifferent map reader, clueless about the maintenance of a bicycle. She insisted that I change a tire, replace a chain, remove and restore a wheel right there in the shop. She required me to buy extra safety lights, a canteen for water and a horn. By the time she finished with me, it would have been less expensive for me to pay the taxi, but I wouldn’t have missed that performance for the price of “excessories.”

  “You never did as well in class,” she remarked when we left.

  “I passed out for you once,” I reminded her.
r />   One of our last excursions before Dr. Pope flew home was to Canterbury to hear Dorothy Sayers lecture. Both Dr. Pope and I were eager to hear her and persuaded Miss Wright to come along for the bonus of watching her. Roussel’s cousin was Dean of the Arches at Canterbury and had offered to introduce us. I was nervous about introducing people to him, never having met him myself, unsure of the proper address. An English friend advised me to address him as “Venerable Sir” and to curtsy. When I got a postcard from him, telling me to look for a tall man in orange garters and signed “Cousin Alec,” I relaxed a little.

  Jane Rule, Dr. Pope and Roussel Sargeant in England

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  We had to change trains and make a close connection on the way down. I never wanted Dr. Pope to feel hurried, so I kept my nervousness to myself. Miss Wright took care of her own suitcase. I helped Dr. Pope out with her suitcase, then went back into the carriage to get mine off the overhead luggage rack. In my haste, I lost control of it and it fell on the head of a woman sitting underneath it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said frantically as she began to tilt sideways. “Are you all right?”

  “Perfectly,” she said, as I propped her upright.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Perfectly sure,” she answered politely, beginning to sag in the other direction.

  The train was about to leave. I had to get off. I had to get us to the next train. I grabbed my suitcase and fled. We did make our connection, but for the rest of the trip, I had the image of that poor woman before me.

  Once we’d got to the cathedral, we waited in a crowd of people for the doors of the lecture room to open.

  “Get a look at that,” Miss Wright said to me, nodding at a dumpy little woman in a shiny grey suit with a man’s shirt and tie.

  At that moment, Cousin Alec appeared, and, as soon as he had greeted us, he turned to the little woman and said, “May I present Dorothy Sayers?”