In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

  Then Christine said, ‘Now what about this job Johnny has with Lester?’ and she felt suddenly cold, almost physically sick. It was as if her body had accepted the fact of Johnny’s deception while her mind lagged behind, in a state of utter disbelief.

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s only a beginning, of course.’

  ‘I hope it works. Lester has changed you know. From the moment he left the Army he became a fly business man with an eye for the main chance. He’s a chameleon.’ She stopped and looked tired. She liked discussing people’s characters, passing judgement with a sigh, a word, a dismissing shrug, but today she had no bite. She sat down. ‘Of course it may lead to something,’ she went on in the hopeful voice of any parent considering a young man’s chances. She gave Mary a sharp look and added, apparently irrelevantly, ‘You know there won’t be much when I die. I have to provide for Clara.’

  Mary said awkwardly, ‘You mustn’t talk about dying.’

  She answered with a return of her old vigour. ‘Why not? It doesn’t worry me. Death is the price you pay for living.’ She smiled in the speculative way that heralded an anecdote. ‘My daily once said she’d lost her husband a few years before. So, thinking I knew the idiom, I said, how sad, what did he die of? But I was wrong. She had lost him, at a fair on Hampstead Heath. Missed him in the crowd, went home and waited, but he never turned up again.’ Mary laughed and she jumped, distractedly, to another subject. ‘How is your father, dear? I like your father.’

  She often said this and it was probably true though there was sometimes an emphasis in her voice that would not have been there if Mary’s father had been a gentleman. Actually, Christine appeared to enjoy his company and in many ways they were astonishingly alike: both grotesques, iron individualists, staunch supporters of any government in power, fanatical believers in the Empire. Occasionally, when he said things like, ‘Well, I mustn’t grumble. I’ve got my health and that’s the main thing,’ there was a mocking gleam in Christine’s eye, but for the most part she seemed to respect his simplicity, his fierce independence. He was no man’s servant. He kept his own hours in his small surgery at the back of the stationer’s shop in the High Street and enjoyed his work there—he believed you could tell a man’s character from his feet. In the evenings he went to a prayer meeting at the chapel or stayed at home, reading paperbacks and listening to Bach on the radiogram.

  Mary said, ‘He doesn’t come here much. He hates travelling, even just a short way on the tube. He says he’s getting too old.’

  ‘We’re none of us getting any younger.’ The platitude, with its archly solemn wisdom, came oddly from her. But she seemed unconscious of it, leaning back in her chair and looking suddenly rather yellow and old. ‘As I was saying,’ she began slowly, her eyes pinned on the wall beyond Mary, ‘I have to provide for Clara. But now Johnny’s future seems settled, I’d like to put the little sum I had set aside for you both into a trust fund for Martin’s education. Johnny wants him to go to his old school, doesn’t he?’

  She looked at Mary shyly, a humble old woman’s look, apologizing, Mary realized with horror, for cutting them out of her will. She sought frantically for something to say but Christine went on hurriedly, anxious to close an embarrassing subject. ‘Johnny does hate this sort of discussion so. But I’d like to get it settled. Perhaps, as Johnny’s working for him now, it might be a good thing to ask Lester to be one of the trustees.’

  She looked suddenly immensely fragile, easily damaged. It was unthinkable that she should be allowed to go innocently to Lester with her little proposition. Mary felt a rush of pity and indignation. The situation was ridiculous and farcical: it was shameful of Johnny to have created it. She felt, at that moment, no anxiety for him at all, no sense of doom. And if she had, it could never have broken through her resentment, through the looming cloud of anger.

  ‘I’m sure Lester won’t mind,’ she said. ‘But perhaps you should leave it a week or two. Talk it over with a solicitor first.’

  Christine looked surprised but she was more flexible than usual. ‘Perhaps I will,’ she said. ‘You are always so sensible, dear.’

  At first, after Christine had gone, Mary felt nothing more complicated than slightly angry astonishment. The issue seemed quite straightforward: Johnny had deceived her, in effect, lied to her—Johnny, whose probity was almost unnatural, he would never cheat the customs or tell a social fib, to save trouble. But a little later, when Martin was settled for the night and she was waiting and watching the clock, bewilderment succeeded to a kind of personal shame: she had lived with Johnny for eight years and she had no idea at all why he should have deceived her.

  They had never been close. Johnny had too many defences against intimacy. He wasn’t shy: he simply hated any intrusion into the hard core of his privacy. Earlier in their marriage this reserve had hurt and angered her. She was naturally quick-tempered and she had tried to quarrel with him, using any silly excuse to try and drag him into an ordinary, warm, human row—hating the way that he would never lose his temper, unable to bear that he should keep any part of himself separate and aloof from her, jealous of what seemed a kind of cold, emotional chastity. But he would never quarrel. When she gibbered at him like a furious monkey, he laughed, lightly and affectionately. She had never been quite sure what she wanted of him—he was never anything less than kind and loving. She was only vaguely and half-guiltily conscious that there was something missing somewhere.

  He came home that evening at the normal time, neat and assured in his clerical grey suit, the gold-initialled pigskin briefcase his mother had given him under his arm. His smile crinkled the skin round his eyes and he kissed her, as he always did, a peck on the cheek. ‘Hallo love,’ he said. ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Martin cut his face at school. It had to be stitched.’

  ‘Poor little chap. Is he awake?’

  ‘No. The doctor gave him a sedative. They said he was awfully brave. He didn’t cry till he got home.’

  ‘Good boy.’ His face fell into the conventional lines of pride and approval. The confident young executive, she thought, casually applauding his son’s bravery though it was unthinkable that he should be anything else but brave.

  Mary said, ‘Did you have a good day?’ She wondered if she caught a wary gleam in his eye. A trembling excitement seized her.

  ‘So-so. Tiring, you know.’

  He yawned, the weary business man, and her excitement ebbed, leaving her cold and oddly ashamed. It seemed suddenly that to catch him out in a lie would be as indecent as spying on a modest spinster in the bathroom.

  ‘Like a drink?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Good,’ he said enthusiastically, for all the world as if they didn’t usually have a drink, at this hour, every day. He turned to the corner cupboard to get the gin and the glasses and said, his back to her, ‘I had lunch with Julian today. He sent you his regards.’ He turned round with a defensive smile. ‘Why don’t you like him, love?’

  He had never asked her that before. She said uneasily, ‘Oh—I don’t know. I don’t have to like him, do I?’

  He shook his head and gave her her drink, looking rather worried and depressed. ‘Of course not. But you’ve simply made up your mind about him, haven’t you?’

  This direct criticism surprised her. He went on, quite urgently, ‘You haven’t anything real against him, have you? Isn’t it just prejudice? I mean,’—he looked apologetic—‘you have awfully set ideas on how people should behave and the sort of jobs they should do and you dismiss Julian because he doesn’t fit into them. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘Perhaps. Part of it, anyway. He’s not a serious person, is he?’ Johnny raised his eyebrows and she added quickly, ‘He doesn’t stick to anything. There was that holiday camp he was running somewhere in Spain—and then that business of buying and selling money in Tangiers. Why doesn’t he do a decent job instead of playing about with sordid little schemes?’

  ‘They were all perfectly respectab
le business ventures, love.’ He laughed outright. ‘He’s made a lot of money.’

  She said angrily, ‘I don’t like barrow boys.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Isn’t that all he is? A barrow boy with an old school tie.’

  Johnny said in a low voice, ‘Not everyone is lucky enough to have a high moral purpose, you know.’

  She felt obscurely guilty as if she had been pretending to virtues she did not possess. She tried to laugh. ‘I always overstate my case, don’t I? I don’t really dislike Julian. He’s awfully easy to like. That’s half the trouble.’

  He seemed relieved, as if she had conceded something. ‘He’s an awfully decent chap,’ he said seriously. ‘There was a time when I was particularly grateful to him.’ He looked at her shyly. ‘That was the last term I was at school, the beginning of the war. It was a hellish time—most of the chaps I knew were just that little bit older than me and had shot straight off into the Army or something. There was nothing to do except moon about and wait for the weeks to go by. I read a lot of poetry, I remember—it’s funny, that was the only time I ever did read much. There was a thing of Housman’s—about a man who didn’t want sweethearts, or foes to conquer, but friends to die for. He found his friends but he couldn’t die for them. “They sought and found six feet of ground, and there they died for me.”’ He gave her an ashamed look and she saw, uncomfortably moved, that there was a shine of tears in his eyes. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve got it right but it was something I felt—oh, unbearably. It meant an awful lot to know other people felt like that. Of course I didn’t tell anyone how I felt—except Julian. He was in the Navy already. He came down to see me once or twice. We went out and he cheered me up and told me not to worry, that I’d soon be out of that snob factory—typical of Julian, that. It was frightfully decent of him to bother. He didn’t have much leave.’

  There was a stupid lump in her throat. She said, ‘Men feel differently about their friends from the way women do, don’t they? They don’t have to approve of them to like them.’

  ‘Julian would never let anyone down.’

  ‘Perhaps not. There’s no need to give him the chance.’ His expression was hurt and she burst out with a cutting edge of anger, ‘We don’t have to talk about him all night, do we?’

  ‘No. I only wanted …’ He stopped and said, ‘Do you feel all right, love? You’re pale.’

  His care for her physical well-being suddenly seemed an affront. It gave her courage. She finished her drink and set the glass down. ‘Can you take the afternoon off, the day after tomorrow? Martin has what they call an Open Day. Parents are expected to turn up and look at the handwork.’

  Johnny frowned, took his diary out of his waistcoat pocket and flicked over the pages. In the second before he answered she had an intense feeling of shame at having asked the question. It was like leaving jewellery about to tempt a thief.

  He pursed his lips and said judiciously, ‘I might be able to manage it but I can’t be sure. Must go carefully with that sort of thing. Show I’m trying to be a good boy.’

  He grinned, a wry, mischievous grin, any husband admitting to any wife his deplorable but unnecessary wage slavery, and she was chilled. Not because he was cheating her, but because he was cheating himself. She felt the kind of embarrassed anguish people feel when the upright old gentleman slips on the banana skin or when someone of value and dignity gets weeping, tearing drunk.

  Something must have shown in her face because he said, ‘Darling—sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  He smiled at her as he stood up and it seemed, suddenly, that her deception was infinitely worse than his. She could not imagine what he would do if he found out that she knew the truth and had not told him. Her own cowardice bewildered her. She said, ‘What did you do today?’

  As soon as she had spoken she was terrified, but he simply said, ‘I went to the office. What do you think?’

  She gabbled hastily, ‘I only meant—did you have a witty lunch with important people? Or is that an illusion common to all wives?’

  He looked at her curiously. ‘But I told you. I lunched with Julian.’

  Her laughter sounded to her own ears as lonely and cheerless as the tinkling of metal bird-scarers on a drenched field. She had the feeling that they were moving in two separate worlds, each clearly visible to the other but impossible of access: they might have been mouthing at each other through sound-proof glass. ‘How stupid of me,’ she said.

  Chapter Seven

  For several days, of course, she had hope. Not that she would dare to tackle him outright—shame, and fear of his shame, had killed that hope in the beginning. For most of the time she hoped in the stunned, idiot way people hope when something has happened that they cannot bear to face: if they shut their eyes tightly enough and for long enough everything will miraculously be as it was before. Occasionally she hoped, more rationally, that he would simply explain to her. That hope rose every morning when he came to breakfast, bathed and smiling, ready for the day. Once he had gone, it faded until he was due home at night and she heard his step on the stair. Hope was highest then, with the evening stretching before them; she was hopeful every time he began a sentence, every time he was silent, every time he looked at her across the room. Then, slowly, hope died and resentment throbbed in its place like an angry scar.

  She saw that for years she had automatically accepted Johnny’s very real virtues, his honesty, his tact, his kindliness, as forming some sort of ultimate standard. He had always treated her with a formal but easy affection: if sometimes she had longed for the tug and thrust of a harder marriage, she had persuaded herself that it was sensation-seeking, a kind of crudeness on her part. Certainly, his goodness seemed so much more apparent than her own that she had eagerly softened her more turbulent emotions and tried to be what she thought he would like, so that now she felt, with a white blaze of anger, he had turned her into someone who was quite inadequate to deal with any real situation. He had made their relationship an emotionally aseptic affair, his gentle remoteness had not civilized but sterilized her.

  She said to Frederick, ‘It’s as if we could only touch each other with rubber gloves.’

  It was a theatrical remark but he neither smiled nor raised his eyebrows. It struck her that she knew no one so easy to talk to as Frederick though plenty who enjoyed listening, particularly when there was something wrong. But Frederick was not greedy for vicarious excitement, his eyes didn’t light up and he never interrupted with contributions of his own. He never talked about himself, Mary thought, and suddenly, remembering the long introspective monologues with which he had bored her when she was living with his mother, she was as startled by the change in him as if she had not seen him since. She looked at him, gravely sucking his empty pipe, his face puckered in an anxious frown that made him seem older and smaller. His thin hair was thinner, his once plump body thin too, almost scarecrowish, and all his clothes had an accidental look as if he had picked them up at a jumble sale when he was thinking of something else. Only the understanding glint on his high forehead was the same; whenever he was particularly, solemnly anxious to be of service, his skin sweated pale, transparent beads, like tears.

  He said, ‘There’s one thing you can be sure of, Mary.’ He blushed—he still blushed—and added with angry seriousness, ‘Johnny would never do anything dishonourable.’

  Another time she might have laughed: there is always something uncomfortably ridiculous, almost to be despised, in friends who are too unguardedly partisan. But now she was simply grateful. She smiled at his pink, indignant face and felt a warm, almost tearful surge of affection, the kind of uprush you feel when you are faced with an old friend and realize how long your friendship has been and how casually you have relied on it. She thought that in a way that dreadful scene his mother had made, though they never alluded to it, had bound them together for life. They could never be anything less than intimate.

&nbs
p; She said, ‘I can’t believe it. I can trust him in anything. He’s never even read a picture postcard that wasn’t addressed to him. And yet he goes off every morning and comes back every night and says he’s had a good day. Oh, Fred …’

  ‘Where is he this evening?’

  ‘He said he’d be late. It’s some business party.’

  Frederick looked down at her with pale, apologetic eyes. ‘You want a drink. We’ll go out. I haven’t anything to offer you here.’

  He glanced round his room with a shy air as if he had suddenly caught a glimpse of it, refracted through her eyes. It was a small room on the top floor of a crumbling terrace house in Bayswater, dark and cold in spite of the bellowing gas fire, with silver streaks of damp like slug trails on the wallpaper. The furniture had a lumber room air and the floor was covered with dismal flowered linoleum. Frederick could easily have afforded something better—his mother had died two years before and he had sold her horrible, dark house—and at first Mary had thought that he only continued to live in his garret out of a kind of affectation of low living and high thinking. Lately, however, she had realized that Frederick simply didn’t care, he could have lived in a palace and not noticed the difference.

  She said, ‘It’s all right. I don’t want anything.’

  But he shook his head firmly. ‘Of course you must have a drink, Mary,’ he said, struggling into his raincoat.

  As they went down the stairs, a young man came into the hall through the open front door. He was tall and slender, he wore narrow trousers and a jacket with shimmering threads woven into the material. He stood against the wall as Mary passed him and ducked his head. Frederick stopped and spoke to him while she waited on the front steps out of earshot. They followed her after a minute. The boy glanced at her, a bland, roguish look and loped off down the road, kicking a stone in the gutter.