In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

All this fussy expectancy soured his mother. Hemmed in on the landing while Frederick was trying, with Mary’s help, to manœuvre a heavy chest from one room to another, she grumbled on a low, angry note, ‘Fuss, fuss, fuss. Anyway, I’d like to know what’s brought your friend running down here in such a hurry.’

  Frederick gave her a glance from his pale-marble eyes that was long, hard and slightly sad. ‘I invited him when we met a couple of months ago. I didn’t mention it then because I didn’t think he’d come.’

  Mrs. Ames sighed dramatically. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you expect me to roll out the red carpet, you’re very much mistaken.’

  For Mary, this faint suggestion of visiting royalty set the tone for the evening. Johnny drove up to the house in his old, white Delage and entered as if to trumpets blowing. For a little while after his arrival, Frederick’s nervousness increased to a pitch of tense unhappiness. He tripped over the furniture, glanced round the room with distraught eyes and asked Johnny three times whether he really wanted to stand, whether he wouldn’t really prefer a comfortable chair.

  ‘This is absolutely fine, old man,’ Johnny said.

  He leaned against the mantelpiece, beneath that terrible oil painting, a glass of sherry in his hand. His face, smiling, was narrow-boned with a beaky nose and a small, fair moustache—a rather harsh, military appearance that was redeemed from ordinariness by a pair of remarkably shaped eyes, almost perfect ellipses and a pale gold in colour, which somehow suggested personal courage, natural authority and a fine, magnanimous way of doing things. It was not a tough or swashbuckling face but in a curious way it made the Air Force blue seem something of an anachronism, as if he should have been wearing the uniform of a cleaner and more chivalrous war, when gentlemen, waving their sabres, charged on horseback to death or victory.

  He was very polite, not stilted, but with that graceful ease of manner that makes so many upper-class young men act like old ones. Between his charm—which was effortless, a kind of beautiful pleasure in himself—and the confusion of handing out sherry, an easier atmosphere established itself. Johnny struck just the right note with Mrs. Ames and made a number of harmless little jokes clearly taken out of a drawer labelled for your friend’s mother. He had a week’s leave and was due to spend the rest of it with a naval friend who had a ‘place’in North Wales. Mary had a vision of Tatler photographs: Squadron-Leader Prothero caught enjoying a joke with the Lady Angela Something wearing white organdie and seed pearls. Mrs. Ames was impressed and amused, almost certainly against her will, for she thought it a degrading weakness to find anyone likeable. Several times she broke into an outburst of kittenish giggling, her big, jellied breasts shuddering and her gross black eyes flirting obscenely with each young man in turn.

  Only Frederick remained uncomfortable. He sat in a rigid, unnatural position on the edge of his chair, watching Johnny tread this gay little measure with his mother. When Mrs. Ames went into the kitchen, there was a pause. It endured miserably. Mary followed Mrs. Ames to help her serve up the blackened corpse of beef that served as a celebration feast in her household.

  As she came back to the drawing-room to announce dinner, Frederick was saying in a harsh, complaining voice, ‘But it really is too bad. I thought you were going to stay a week, at least.’

  A little apprehensive, Mary stood silently in the doorway and waited for them to notice her.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry.’ Johnny sounded baffled as if he had apologized more than once already. ‘I honestly did think I’d made it clear on the telephone. I suppose the line was too wretchedly bad. Actually, I was due at Julian’s a couple of days ago but his leave was postponed at the last minute. It should be rather fun,’ he added tactlessly; though of course there was no reason why he should have thought tact necessary. ‘He’s, promised me some shooting. Only rabbits, of course.’

  Frederick’s neck reddened, though his face remained pale. He looked just like his mother when she was spoiling for a row. ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you any glamorous pursuits,’ he said absurdly. There was a despairing bitterness in his voice that seemed to be due to something more than simple annoyance because his friend was only filling in time with him. He went on pettishly, ‘I never understood why you didn’t join the Navy like Julian. I would have thought you would have found it more socially acceptable than the R. A.F.’

  Mary held her breath, expecting an outburst from Johnny. She thought it a fearful insult to accuse anyone of snobbery. But he just said mildly, ‘Oh, I don’t know. My people aren’t naval, you know. Of course my grandfather was pretty fed up when I didn’t go into the Army. But the R.A.F.’s all right.’ He caught sight of Mary and stood up, adding lightly, ‘Some of them are quite decent chaps, you know.’

  He looked rather pleased with himself for seeing this remark was amusing and smiled, though his eyes rested on Frederick with faint perplexity.

  ‘The ghastly thing about you,’ Frederick shouted, ‘is that you only pretend to think that’s funny.’ He got up in a rush, eyes glaring, bit savagely on the new pipe he had bought that morning, jerked it manfully upright and dropped it out of his mouth. It clattered onto the brass fender and broke. ‘Damn,’ said Frederick and looked as if he might be going to cry. Some of the pieces had rolled under the armchair and he grovelled after them, his fat, khaki-coloured bottom in the air. Though she was sorry for him, Mary wanted to laugh. She wondered why he was so anxious to pick a quarrel.

  It wasn’t until years later that she understood.

  After dinner they drove in Johnny’s car—he had plenty of petrol, saved up over several leaves—to a small fishing hotel in the hills. The expedition had been Frederick’s idea but it was Johnny who had asked Mary to join them and, to her delighted astonishment, Mrs. Ames had beamed and encouraged and said what a nice outing it would be for her—almost as if she saw Johnny as a dazzling young woman who was threatening her son and Mary as an effective chaperone. But, rattling about in the back of the Delage, Mary did not wonder why Mrs. Ames had let her come, or worry because Frederick had not really wanted her. She only marvelled at her own luck, out on the spree this lovely evening with two young men.

  It was an expensively simple hotel, empty of locals. The bar was full of stuffed fish in glass cases, polished brass, Army officers and Air Force pilots. Frederick peered round him with a shy, almost lost air, for an empty table. His limp, as he led them to a corner, was more pronounced than usual as if he suddenly needed to explain to everyone why he was not in uniform. He fussed over removing the froth-rimmed glasses from the table, complained because they were not serving drinks on the terrace and then said, in such a loud, aggressive voice that more than one winged and ribboned officer turned to stare at them, ‘What will you have? Mary? Johnny?’

  ‘It’s my party,’ Johnny said. ‘No, old man. I insist.’

  ‘I’ll have brandy and ginger ale,’ Mary said. This was not bravado: she had the idea, inherited from her grandmother, that brandy was medicinal.

  ‘A lager would be more suitable,’ Frederick said highhandedly. He gave her a frowning glance and to her disgust, she found herself blushing.

  She said, ‘I don’t like beer,’ and added, feeling young and callow, ‘I was eighteen last week.’

  ‘I should have thought you much older,’ Johnny said. His smile deepened. ‘This is a celebration, then. How absolutely marvellous.’

  His amused response was mechanical but enormously warming. She was hurt when he had gone to edge his way to the bar and Frederick said, ‘He’s almost as sincere as he sounds. About ninety-five per cent is genuine. It’s the last five per cent that’s just empty good manners and sticks in the gullet.’

  Mary was too young to be much concerned with people’s relationships with each other, she was only interested in their attitude towards herself. She did not understand yet that there is sometimes more love in criticism than in praise: you want the loved one to be perfect. She saw only that, beside Johnny, Frederick had an unfinished air and thou
ght he was simply envious because Johnny found it so easy to be agreeable and do the right thing.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ she said.

  He turned to her with a shocked face. ‘Oh no, Mary.’

  A deep blush—Frederick coloured up as easily as a shy girl—crept up his neck and darkened the skin under his thinning hair. He closed his eyes as if to shut out some appalling vision and muttered, ‘What a dreadful thing to say.’

  She was at a loss. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

  He leaned forward; plump, freckled hands gripping plump knees, his eyes wide and grave. His long, serious gaze was embarrassing; she attempted a rueful grin. He shook his head, sighing. ‘Mary,’ he began, and paused. He gave another long sigh. ‘Mary, you must believe me. There is nothing like that. Nothing at all.’

  It was Mary’s turn to be shocked. She saw that for Frederick the word ‘jealous’had an immediate, sexual connotation. She knew that men sometimes fell in love with each other but nothing had been further from her mind. She felt a queer mixture of pride and horror in the knowledge that Frederick thought her capable of what seemed an enormously sophisticated accusation. But to blurt out the truth was impossible: he would be appalled to realize the suggestion had been in his mind alone. Matching his seriousness she said in a low voice, ‘I believe you,’ and avoided his eyes.

  She was relieved when Johnny came back with the drinks. He brought several Army officers with him. Mary saw that he would be bound to find friends and acquaintances almost everywhere. She shook hands with a pink young Captain, with a bull-necked Major who looked ten years older than Johnny or Frederick but who had apparently been at school with them.

  They were all nice to her in a jolly, casual way and refilled her glass repeatedly, but she was a little frightened and naturally out of it as much as Frederick, whose voice she could hear from time to time, plaintively mentioning to the Major one school friend after another with the frenetic hopelessness of the unpopular boy at a re-union party. The Captain, sitting beside her, asked, ‘Do you know Billy Stringer?’

  She shook her head and looked encouraging, which was a mistake, because he at once reeled off a number of other names and looked faintly puzzled when she knew none of them. She thought he was probably drunk, his eyes focused on her so very uncertainly, and was relieved when he returned silently to his drink. For a while she sat with her head inclined to one side as if listening to distant music and smiled copiously whenever she caught anyone’s eye. Finally the Captain asked her if her father was in the Army. ‘He’s too old,’ she said, and then realized that he had meant was it her father’s profession? ‘My father is a chiropodist,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a good one,’ he crowed, throwing back his head and slapping his hand on the table.

  ‘But it’s not a joke, he is,’ she said, surprised. He stopped laughing and gave her an odd look, bemused and disbelieving. She saw that if she persisted in telling the truth he would think her affectedly silly—more, half mad. In his world you did not meet chiropodists, or their daughters, socially.

  Like the others, he was Regular Army. Their conversation seemed to Mary to consist of a series of uproarious anecdotes about people she had never heard of. Her attention drifted to a blond Flight Sergeant at the bar. He had a lot of fine down on his red cheeks and was singing ‘Danny Boy’. He had a lusty voice and gave a splendid performance, caricaturing a sobbing, Irish tenor. When the last notes died away Mary became aware that Frederick had given up stumbling after a rapport with the fat-necked Major and was having a row with him. They had got on to politics: the Government, the Major maintained, was out to ruin not only the Empire, but the Army.

  ‘It’s so bloody feudal,’ Frederick burst out. ‘All this nonsense about officers and men. The Americans wouldn’t stand for it.’

  There was a roar of laughter as if he had said something surpassingly witty. ‘The men prefer it,’ the Major said with a drunken air of uttering gospel wisdom. ‘They like to feel their officer is a cut above them. It gives them confidence. You can’t expect them to respect their officers if they see them getting drunk in the Sergeants’ Mess.’

  Frederick’s eyes were red. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he said, his voice rising shrilly. ‘It’s so undemocratic.’

  Though the others had laughed as much at the Major as with him, Frederick’s ineffective righteousness was as indecent as a dirty joke in mixed society. They stared glumly at their drinks.

  ‘Democracy isn’t necessarily the best form of government,’ said Johnny, speaking directly and soothingly to Frederick. ‘It’s often the worst sort of people who get to the top. They’re the only ones who will bother to push themselves there.’

  He smiled round the table with sweet, rather remote good humour.

  Frederick said sarcastically, ‘You mean people ought to be content in the station to which it has pleased God to call them?’

  ‘No—of course not.’ Johnny frowned as if he were trying to work out what he really did feel. ‘It’s just that it seems somehow degrading to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ he said.

  Mary saw that he really believed this. It wasn’t so much snobbery as a deep, fastidious arrogance that was curiously inoffensive because so very old-fashioned: the kind of arrogance you sometimes glimpse in dark portraits of bewhiskered Victorian gentlemen, confident of their place in the world.

  Chapter Two

  It was a miraculous night, still, moonless and scented. Johnny drove fast, the headlamps cutting straight into the dark curve of the night, descending in swoops down the wavy mountain road to the dark town.

  Once in bed, Mary fell asleep instantly. She woke to find the bedside lamp burning and a man standing beside it and watching her. After a second of surging panic she saw it was only Frederick in pyjamas and grey woollen dressing-gown. He lay down on the bed and pulled her into his arms.

  Astonished, she lay passive while he kissed her with moist, despairing kisses, passionate in a theoretical kind of way as if he were following instructions in a booklet. She was only half-awake, only half-embarrassed, not seriously alarmed. She did not move hand or foot and Frederick was careful not to touch any part of her body other than her face and shoulders, nor to disarrange the bedclothes. Although he moaned endearments, Mary sensed that he was no more excited than she was. It was their conversation in the pub that had provoked this behaviour, she slowly realized. He was trying to prove to himself that he was not interested in Johnny. She was stupidly proud of this imaginative leap but it only produced a farcical situation. It was impossible, for pity’s sake, to protest or push him away.

  Then a board squeaked on the landing and a great hollow of fear opened before her.

  ‘It’s all right. Someone’s gone to the bathroom,’ Frederick whispered.

  He sat up cautiously, smoothing back a strand of hair. He swallowed. ‘Oh God. I’m sorry. It was unforgivable.’

  He looked pitiably ashamed but she thought his remorse affected. She could not believe that he was not obsessed, as she was, by the fear that Mrs. Ames would come in and find them together. Terror beat wings in her throat. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she whispered back, straining her ears for further sounds from the landing.

  He took her hand and said with abstract tenderness, as if quietening a panicky child, ‘Don’t worry, Mary. No one will have heard us.’

  The board creaked again and this time she knew it was the same board that always bothered her if she got up to go to the bathroom in the night. It was just outside her room. As she gripped Frederick’s hand, Mrs. Ames opened the door and stood there in her peach satin nightgown and blue woollen bed jacket, the long, long hair that had once captivated Mr. Ames released from its daytime ear-phones and falling richly on her shoulders.

  ‘I thought as much,’ she said.

  Frederick stood up. ‘I’ve got a headache,’ he said. ‘I came to see if Mary had an aspirin.’

  Mrs. Ames smiled with a kind of gloating, personal triumph. Embarrassment w
as unknown to her. She would have smiled in just the same way if she had actually caught them in bed together.

  ‘Do you expect me to believe that?’ Her smile became a theatrically incredulous leer.

  Mary sat upright, clutching the sheet to her throat. ‘It’s true,’ she lied desperately. ‘I hadn’t got an aspirin. So we were just talking. I couldn’t sleep …’

  ‘Liar,’ Mrs. Ames said. ‘Filthy little liar. Dirty little tart.’

  ‘Mother,’ Frederick protested. His mouth was twitching nervously.

  ‘You keep out of this.’ Her eyes fixed on Mary, dark and curiously shining. ‘I’ve caught you out properly, Madam, haven’t I?’

  Mary felt sick and cold. She was frightened of Mrs. Ames in the way she would be frightened of an idiot or a wild animal: she did not understand why she behaved as she did. She only knew, horrified and uncomprehending, that Mrs. Ames was glorying in the situation. This was something better than a dirty bit of gossip about a neighbour or a salacious paragraph in the Sunday paper. For once she had a marvellous outlet for her stores of malice and frustration.

  She began in a voice that was low and controlled enough. ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve had my eye on you from the word go. I know your type, bred in the gutter, live in the gutter. Oh—I’ve watched you, don’t think I haven’t. Treading mud all over the house as if you’d been born in a pig sty, leaving filthy things about for men to see—pretending you couldn’t say Boo to a goose … you needn’t think you took me in with your “yes, Auntie”, and “no, Auntie”.’

  Mary ground her fists into her ears. The room roared about her, the woman’s face seemed to float in mid-air, a swollen, purple bag of anger, her voice rose in a screech. ‘… ingratitude … under my own roof … I suppose you thought you could catch Frederick that way … my innocent boy … slut … randy little bitch…’

  She let out a stream of words Mary had never heard before. There was a dribble of spit at the corners of her mouth and she showed the whites of her eyes like a frightened horse.