by Nina Bawden
Memory would later make the scene ludicrous: Frederick cowering against the wall, tears streaming down his face; a distantly glimpsed, pale face—Johnny’s—at the door; Mrs. Ames in her flowing, satin nightgown, slowly inflating like some hideous balloon and gabbling obscenities like a frustrated spinster under an anaesthetic. But at the time Mary was half crazed with fear. Mrs. Ames was terrifying, all powerful. There was no defence against her.
‘It’s not true,’ Mary cried hoarsely. ‘Frederick’s not capable of it.’
It was a cruel thing to say, far crueller than anything Mrs. Ames had said: her ravings were horrible but so fantastic as to be meaningless. In spite of her fear, in the split second before she spoke Mary knew this. She also knew that no one could possibly blame her for saying it. It was licensed cruelty, a thing beyond pardon.
Mrs. Ames cried out and hit her across the face. Mary’s head jerked back against the bedstead and blood poured from her nose. Mrs. Ames clawed at the bedclothes and then grunted as someone caught her round the waist. Tipping her head back and holding a handkerchief to her face, Mary saw her lose her balance, screaming and clutching at Johnny’s arm. Frederick seized a chair and together they thrust her into it. Mary’s eyes fixed on the detail of her bare feet, dragging on the floor. The ankles were puffy with veins the colour of ripe, dark plums. Mrs. Ames began to moan, a long, monotonous, animal sound.
‘Stop that,’ Johnny said. ‘Stop it at once, d’you hear?’ He was dressed in blue trousers and shirt. His face wore an expression of calm distaste as he waited for silence with the confidence of the best kind of schoolmaster producing order in a classroom, or the best kind of Empire builder quelling a native riot. Mrs. Ames stopped moaning. She sat, eyes glazed, fists doubled on the arms of the chair, breathing like an exhausted runner.
‘Ames,’ Johnny said, turning, as it were, to the head prefect or his aide-de-camp. ‘What’s all this about?’
Frederick muttered something that Mary couldn’t catch. He was white as a cuttle-fish, the freckles stood out on his skin like stones.
‘Get out,’ Mrs. Ames said. ‘Get out.’ She gripped the arms of the chair and struggled to get up. ‘How dare you come in here—interfering, pushing your nose in where it’s not wanted. What business is it of yours anyway?’ Panting, she managed to stand upright.
Johnny smiled with cold courtesy. ‘As much my business as anyone’s, wouldn’t you say?’
His politeness was a form of contempt that rang out, clear and hard as a bell. Mrs. Ames’s gaze flew wildly to her son. Frederick gave a long, trembling sigh and put his hand gently on her arm.
Johnny said, ‘Mrs. Ames, I was witness to most of the things you said tonight. To this child.’ His voice hardened with the merest hint of anger, enough to give Mary a sudden, gleeful sense of vengeful anticipation, not enough to make him lose his dignity. ‘And I must tell you, regretfully, that if I hear any more of these malicious, lying accusations from you, or if any are reported to me, I shall suggest that Mary’s parents take action on her behalf.’
It was chivalrous and just. It was also slightly ridiculous like turning big guns on a rabbit. Directed against someone of his own sort, this precise, legal threat would have been pompous to the point of absurdity. To Mrs. Ames, it opened up unplumbed depths of shame and horror. She looked nakedly, utterly bewildered, her black eyes staring, her long jaw beginning to quiver. For a moment, for all the dreadful joy in watching her humiliation, Mary felt a painful wrench of shame and pity. But when Mrs. Ames began to cry, slow, awful crying that made her face old and ugly beyond belief, adult compassion died and she felt only a child’s terror and revulsion. It was a kind of physical disgust, as if she had just bitten into an apple and found it crawling with maggots. Gulping like a child ashamed to cry, she got out of bed and ran from the room, ran blindly down the stairs and out into the dark, empty garden.
When Johnny came after her, she was shivering in the wet grass by the laurel bushes and beginning to be disgusted with herself with the anguished egotism of the very young. She should have stood up for herself, argued—as if it had been possible to argue—not rushed out into the night, barefoot and in her nightgown. But when Johnny crossed the lawn, thoughtfully carrying her slippers and her tweed school coat, the unselfconscious seriousness of his manner reassured her. He slipped the coat round her shoulders and she began to cry, loud, childish sobs that he stifled against his shoulder.
She was not a child, though: leaning against him after the tears had stopped, she felt physical desire, sharp and immediate. For some reason this made her feel ashamed. She drew away from him, blushing in the shadows.
He said gently, ‘Put your slippers on. You’ll catch cold.’
Obediently, she put them on and then stood, waiting.
He said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with you?’ His voice was half-humorous but assured her of his kindliness and his ability to deal with this—with any—situation.
Mary relaxed, as if in a pair of sheltering arms. He could be responsible for everything. She said, with exaggerated, waif-like appeal, ‘I’m sorry I said that about Frederick.’
‘Why? You were perfectly right. It’s hard to see poor old Fred as a wicked seducer.’
Though she knew she had deliberately misled him, that she had intended him to think her too young to mean anything else, his casual words were like balm; she felt healed and forgiven. Gratefully, she handed him the more immediate problem. ‘I don’t know what I can say to Mrs. Ames.’
He raised his eyebrows, surprised. ‘There’s no reason why you should say anything to her. Naturally, you can’t stay here. That’s obvious.’ He hesitated. ‘You must go home to your mother.’
Mary had a terrible desire to laugh. ‘My mother is dead.’
‘Oh.’ He bent towards her. ‘I’m sorry.’
He stood very close, not touching her. The garden was grey with the promise of dawn and there was a warm, grass-scented breeze. It was the sort of moment when you can talk to a stranger. Mary said, ‘She died when I was nine. She killed herself. She had a growth in her breast. It was benign but she was sure it was cancer because doctors never tell you the truth.’
‘You poor child,’ he said with a kind of stiff gentleness that told her she had overshot the mark of intimacy. He wasn’t snubbing her, nor was he shy, he simply had a strict regard for other people’s privacy: this was a confidence that she might prefer, later, not to have made. Although she guessed this, she was appalled, as if she had been making emotional capital out of her mother’s death.
She said quickly, ‘My father brought me up. My mother died ages ago, before the war.’
He smiled as if that wasn’t so long ago to him.
‘I’m sure your father would be horrified if you stayed here after tonight.’
‘I suppose so,’ she said doubtfully, realizing that she could not bear the thought of telling her father what had happened: he would be so shocked, even, perhaps, disbelieving. He was so sure of the decency and kindness of ordinary people that Mrs. Ames’s behaviour would seem to him monstrous, almost mythical, like some dark wickedness out of an old Gothic tale. Mary thought that she could not imagine her father ever being in an ordinary, human dilemma or anyone daring to humiliate him; it was as if he created a moral climate about him in which everyone always behaved with a simple, forthright goodness like characters out of Little Women. Besides, he had been very impressed by Mrs. Ames and the pompous, Victorian comfort of her house. On the one occasion he had visited Mary, neat as a pin in his best navy suit, he had said when she saw him off at the station, ‘Try not to be a trouble to Mrs. Ames. It’s good of her to take you in.’
‘I’m going home soon anyway,’ she said. ‘Term ends in a fortnight. And I’m leaving school.’ Secure in his presence, Mrs. Ames’s outburst suddenly presented itself as no more than an exaggerated form of her normal behaviour. She giggled rather hysterically. ‘I shall be all right. I’m used to her. It wasn’t really so shocking.’
His serious expression rebuked her. ‘You can’t possibly stay. She’s a terrible woman.’ He paused and added gravely, ‘And it was shocking. I have never been so shocked in my life.’
‘But I can’t just leave …’
‘Give me one good reason why not.’
Mary hesitated. Clearly, to his mind, no nice young girl could bear to stay in a house where she had been so outrageously insulted. Besides this simple belief, her very real objections—that it would be impossible to explain to her father and to the school why she had to leave in such a hurry—would sound frivolous. She saw that Johnny was the sort of person whose attitudes are so right, so decent, that other people would sometimes have to falsify their own in order to live up to him. She shivered suddenly and he put his hand on her shoulder.
‘Try not to think about it,’ he said. ‘It’s all over now.’ He lifted his chin and looked very lively and competent. ‘Go and pack your things. You live in London, don’t you? I’ll drive you home now, right away.’
She protested, embarrassed, ‘I can’t let you do that. It’s too far …’ He looked at her quizzically and she went on with a queer little flare of resentment. ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? I mean—honestly—there’s no need to go to such preposterous lengths.
After all, you could just put me on a train and wash your hands of me. You’re being too gallant.’
He said simply, ‘Isn’t that better than not bothering to make an effort if it doesn’t happen to suit you?’ He smiled. ‘I haven’t any ulterior motive, I promise. I shan’t try to seduce you.’
This easy disclaimer excited and depressed her at the same time. Here was a young man who had flown up high and seen the world spread out beneath him like a map. It was ridiculous of her to suppose she could have anything to offer him. ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said and felt she had spoken too quickly to be convincing. She laughed, shyly. ‘It’s just that I don’t understand why you’re being so awfully kind.’
He laughed out loud. ‘My dear child, I’m quite sure that I feel the normal amount of pleasure and sinful pride in my masterful handling of the situation.’
This may have been true, though it didn’t, in human terms, lessen the value of his gentleness and goodwill. But, as she had guessed already, his motives were simplified by a strong sense of the kind of behaviour expected of a gentleman. He rescued her—even at the time she understood this perfectly well—as naturally as he would have rescued a tree’d kitten; it was precisely that kind of action, the automatic, quite impersonal chivalry he would always show to something weaker than himself. On the other hand, he was concerned for her; his kindness wasn’t hypocritical. Like his other excellent qualities it was a perfectly good, hall-marked article from the same shop as his good manners and his accent and his officer’s sword—not an expensive shop, necessarily, but a hushed, respectful one like Gieves, where everything is of good quality and built to last and no one gives you a bill.
When they married, something over a year later, the war was over and Mary was just nineteen, still young enough, even if she hadn’t been young for her age, her mind still the sharp, narrow mind of a clever schoolgirl, to be a little awed by the fact that he wanted her. Not over-awed—when peace came and Johnny signed on for another five years, she saw this was in a way a safety measure, a shelving of the problems of peace—but sufficiently so, to keep her image of him unchanged for years. It struck her, long afterwards, that your knowledge of people, even of the people you love, is confined to certain set pictures, snapshots, taken at different times and in different poses. At some point you thumb over the album and see that the pose, though a pretty one, is suddenly out of date. But when did it happen? How do you pick out the moment of change over the years?
Chapter Three
Seven years of peace is a long time, long enough to change a lot of people but Charles Franks was neither curious nor nostalgic. He had gone to the re-union party because he was, briefly, lonely in London. He had just come back after three years in America; people had moved, Charles had not kept in touch, taking his friends where he found them.
He knew it was a mistake as soon as he entered the crowded room. He thought, isn’t it always? Who do you ever meet at this sort of function except the man you most disliked, the veteran bore, the man with the hard luck story? There were too many men for whom war had been a time when they counted, for whom peace was just a long, boring appendix to their biography.
As if to bear him out, it was Climper who accosted him almost at once. He said, they’d been at Scempton together, hadn’t they? Charles remembered him with difficulty: a big, facetious man with a flourishing ginger moustache and a thin, reedy laugh, a good pilot, a stout drinker, by his own account a wow with the women. Since then he had been out to Rhodesia, sunk his gratuity in a car business and come home again. ‘No future there,’ he said. ‘They’re going to get too soft with the munts. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Christ, man, you’ve got your future to think of.’
‘Of course,’ Charles said, thinking, what future? This Climper, seven years older, pale eyes swimming in gin, ginger hair spread sparsely over his glistening scalp, had just got a new car on the firm and was buying a nice little bungalow at Southend-on-Sea but his suit was shabby, his cuffs frayed. As he talked, his eyes darted: he had his future to think of and someone more important might come in. For Charles, that shifting, unconfident glance spelt failure more clearly than the shabby suit. He thought guiltily: poor old Climper, and wondered how soon he could get away.
The chance came sooner than he had hoped for. Someone laughed across the room and he saw Johnny Prothero, standing with a group of men by the long buffet table.
Climper said, ‘Gentleman Jim’s turned up, I see. We should be honoured.’ He curled his lip sourly, caught Charles’s eye and added in mock apology, ‘Sorry. I forgot you moved in such exalted circles.’
Charles said, ‘Didn’t you know? I was Court Jester.’
Climper grinned with malicious delight and Charles felt a quick surge of anger. He had dropped straight into the trap, sunk to Climper’s level. Coldly ashamed, he excused himself almost at once, cutting the man off, he realized immediately afterwards, in the middle of a sentence. He knew Climper would have done the same if he had sighted a more promising audience; all the same, the small discourtesy nagged him as he threaded his way through the press.
Then he forgot Climper. ‘Charles, how marvellous,’ Johnny said, pumping his hand, and the drawling, Southern English voice with the emphatic adjective kicked Charles’s mind back seven years, so that for a moment he was surprised to see Johnny not in his flying jacket, his oxygen mask dangling from its strap. Certainly, he looked no older. His face was barely more lined than it had been then, except for a few more sun crinkles round those astonishing eyes—still an oddly innocent face, Charles thought with a pang, the kind of face that makes you feel old and a bit debauched and tired of the things you’ve done that you’re ashamed of.
‘It really is wonderful to see you,’ Johnny said, still holding his hand and smiling as if there was no one in the whole wide world he had so much wanted to see. It was a way he had, Charles remembered, a beautifully effective form of flattery that nevertheless produced a slight constraint: the welcome was so warmly, so unaffectedly effusive that you despaired of matching it.
He said awkwardly, ‘Johnny, you old idiot,’ and suddenly, in spite of his very real pleasure, he felt an odd, instinctive withdrawal that was more than the ordinary nervousness of meeting an old friend after a period of years. Johnny was more than an old friend, he had once been a kind of idol.
His feeling for Johnny had been part of a larger affection, for England. Charles’s mother had been an Englishwoman, his father a Czech, a dentist in Prague. They were both Jewish though apart from an occasional observance to please some elderly relation, they did not practise their religion, nor did they have many Jewish friends. They had hardly, until the middle thirties, thought
of themselves as Jews. But it was not a club you could elect to join or decide to resign from; at that time, to be a Jew in Europe was to be a martyr without a choice. Charles and his mother came to England in the early summer of nineteen thirty-eight. His father was to follow them when he had settled their affairs; sold his practice, dealt with the small, family business, made arrangements for an old, sick aunt to be sent into the country to friends. It all took longer than he expected and longer than it need have done. He lingered like so many others out of an unreasonable, unreasoning hope and perhaps, also, out of fear: he was no longer a young man, it was his whole life, not just his practice or his dental factory that he was leaving behind. And like so many others, he left it too late. The weeks went by and the months. The boy Charles, safe in his mother’s own county of Kent, was afraid for his father, for his old Aunt Sophie, for his little cousin, Lise—and placed, as a result, an unyouthfully high value on safety. He was a wary, analytical, in some ways almost a hard, young man but he lavished on the country that sheltered him a wholehearted and uncritical love. It was the payment of a debt of gratitude that embraced the climate, the plain, gentle people, the warm beer, even the stubborn habit of shunning the metric system and driving on the left of the road. Above all, at Scempton when they had flown together—Charles had been rear gunner—it had charged his feelings for Johnny with a romantic extravagance: he was the kind of Englishman Charles had read about in Buchan, gentle, courteous, a master of the throw-away line, the understated bravery. (One trip, two shells had hit them, one through the turret, one behind the port wing. All Charles knew was the searing yellow flash that seemed to split his eyes open. When he came round, the moon was at his feet like a ball and someone was saying, ‘I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit.’ Charles came down and found the fuselage on the port side gone, the floor up to the tank a mass of flames and smoke. There was a man doubled up like a rag doll; Charles turned him over and saw his eyes, scarlet pools in the dark, crusted mess of his face. He shouted that the petrol tank was on fire, astonished to hear his own voice. There was a long, empty moment of terror in which he knew he could do nothing, his limbs would not answer him. Then Johnny said, ‘Put it out, then,’ as if he were asking someone to pass the butter. That was all, but it was the sort of thing Charles remembered. The sort of thing that had happened more than once, when his courage would have fallen apart if Johnny had not been there.)