In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

  ‘One of my clients,’ Frederick explained. ‘Not a very promising one.’ He laughed. ‘He’s terribly polite, enormously helpful, but there’s nothing to be done for him really. He’s the kind that makes me feel like Canute in a shabby raincoat.’

  She thought that this was one thing Frederick had not changed in—his nervous habit of mocking at things he really cared about. Once, when Johnny had asked him why he had given up the Church, he had blushed and then said that he had lost his belief in the efficacy of prayer. It had occurred to him that the Royal Family who were prayed for daily in every Church throughout the land, had no longer an expectation of life than anyone else.

  They went to a drinking club off Westbourne Grove. It was full of women, dancing with each other and drinking bottled beer at tiny tables. Frederick bought two lagers and they settled at a table near the wall. Mary sipped her pale beer and watched the dancers. She thought of a smart remark about them and bit it back. Frederick had not brought her here to amuse her but because it was the first place they came to. He would have taken her to the Ritz if it had been more convenient.

  He looked round him with an abstracted air and filled his pipe with the rather nasty herbal tobacco he affected. Then he said abruptly, ‘What are you afraid of?’

  The question shocked her. Until he asked it, she had not known she was afraid. She had been angry, indignant, bewildered. Now, suddenly and inexplicably, she felt fear, like someone lying half awake in a warm bed and watching the door open slowly.

  ‘I don’t know, Fred.’

  ‘You must have had something in mind. Otherwise you would simply have asked him, wouldn’t you?’ He smiled with the gentlest possible malice. ‘You’re usually uncomfortably direct.’

  ‘Not with Johnny.’ She fumbled in her bag for cigarettes. ‘I was ashamed to ask.’

  ‘I see that. But why?’

  ‘I suppose there are lots of reasons. One of them—oh, it’s too ridiculous.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  She lit her cigarette. ‘All right. When I was a child, there was a man who lived next door. He was a clerk or something—he always wore pin-striped trousers and paper collars. He had something wrong with his neck, he always held his head on one side and it used to shake a little. His wife was always cleaning windows and shaking mats out of the back door. There was a boy they were going to send to the grammar school, they wouldn’t let him play in the street. They were terribly respectable. Then he lost his job, one summer, before the war. He wasn’t out of work for long, a couple of months at the most, but all the time he went on going off every day, wearing his striped trousers, a clean collar, catching the same train. Of course everyone knew. My mother used to talk it over with her friends—though they were awfully kind, really. They never let him know they knew.’

  She ground out her half-smoked cigarette. ‘I used to wonder what he did all day. Sat in the park—or fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.…’ Her voice faltered, for a moment she saw Johnny among the lonely people in the park, waiting on a bench with his briefcase beside him, waiting for the hands to crawl round his expensive watch. But the image was ludicrously sentimental. Johnny had nothing in common with that sad clerk. She said, ‘But it’s nonsense, of course. Johnny’s not respectable.’

  She started to smile, but something in Frederick’s face stopped her. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  His mouth was set and unhappy. ‘He could do something like that. To—save you worry.’

  The bald admission was terrible. She said miserably, ‘Am I so useless?’

  He reached out compassionately for her hand. Hurt, she jerked it away and saw that a tall woman with grey, cropped hair who was wearing a man’s sports jacket and brown cords, was watching them with sly interest as if they were freaks at a fair.

  Frederick said gently, ‘I think you need security more than most women.’ He frowned as if afraid this sounded like a condemnation and added quickly, ‘Though all women need it. Particularly if they have children.’

  ‘Is that unreasonable? We didn’t all have rich grandfathers.’

  There was nothing accusing in Frederick’s silence. She accused herself. ‘I was upset when he left the advertising job. Oh—I know it was different from anything he’d done before. And it was a bad time because he was so upset about failing his flying medical. But he didn’t give it a chance. He was so contemptuous. He said it wasn’t the way he wanted to live—that he wanted to do something better than sell soap.’ She stared at her glass. ‘I told him he was being irresponsible.’

  ‘There’s nothing irresponsible, surely, in wanting to do a decent job?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ She felt confused, on obscure ground. She seized thankfully on something concrete. ‘He’s not qualified for anything. He never went to a university. He just expects something worthwhile to fall into his lap—as a kind of right. It’s such a privileged view.’

  ‘But not necessarily a bad one. Scrabbling after food and rent isn’t the most important thing, after all. I mean—once survival at that level isn’t in question any more, civilized people have to change their values, don’t they?’

  He looked at her earnestly and she smiled a little. Frederick was never deterred by cliches because he didn’t know they were cliches: he worked out everything for himself, from first principles, and saw each stale old truth with a fresh and eager eye. He was simple and good, he always saw the best in people, probably because his mother had always seen the worst. Frederick’s was the better attitude, Mary thought, but neither was objective. And although he had made a great deal seem easier, she was aware, still, of an area in her mind where a dark uneasiness lay. She said, ‘I know I haven’t been much help.’ She lifted her chin, acknowledged her guilt and determined to put things right. ‘What can I do, Fred?’

  He laughed. ‘How like you that is.’ He gave her a sudden look of hope. ‘You’re sure you can’t just ask him?’

  ‘No.’ She had the feeling that there was some reason they had not touched on and that she did not want to touch on and that Frederick knew it too. His smile vanished, he gave her a worried glance.

  ‘You could find out where he goes, what he’s doing.’ He hesitated. ‘You could follow him.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘No.’ He knocked out his pipe, unscrewed the bowl and began to scrape it out with an implement on his penknife. ‘It could be important. He might even be ill.’

  ‘Do you think that’s likely?’

  ‘Well—no. Of course, the most surprising people break down. But you can’t help unless you know what’s going on, can you?’

  She burst out helplessly, trembling on the edge of both laughter and anger, ‘But how could I do that? It’s bad enough—sitting here and talking about him. But to trail him—as if he were an erring husband on an adulterous spree … He would never do anything so mean, so underhand.…’

  ‘It’s yourself you’d be hurting, not him,’ Frederick said bracingly. ‘Sometimes people have to do things, that aren’t very pretty.’

  She gasped, weakly hysterical, ‘But I wouldn’t know how. I’m not a boy scout or a detective.’

  ‘It’s not so difficult.’ He smiled quite serenely, like a driving instructor comforting a nervous pupil. ‘It’s easy enough to keep out of sight in London. And if he did see you, he’d never guess.’

  He looked uncomfortable and suddenly she tumbled off her uneasy perch onto the side of anger. ‘You mean it wouldn’t enter his head that I could play a dirty trick like that?’ She stood up. ‘I should never have talked to you.’

  ‘Mary,’ he said, startled, and held out his hand.

  She ignored it. ‘It’s monstrous, you have no right …’ Her voice rose, a few heads, some ambiguously shorn, turned in her direction. She saw that although it was satisfying to get angry with Frederick it solved nothing, and this made her angrier still. ‘I thought you were his friend,’ she muttered, almost in tears, and blundere
d out from behind the table. She walked straight out, through the crowded room and up the bare, shabby stairs.

  He was waiting outside the door of her house. It was raining when she came out of the tube station and she was soaked and shivering. He handed her her folded mackintosh.

  ‘You left this,’ he said mildly. ‘I ran after you but it was too late. I had to get a taxi across the park.’ He felt the sleeve of her suit. ‘You’re soaking wet.’ His tone reproved her gently for her carelessness and for the extravagance of the taxi. He never travelled in anything but public transport.

  She took her raincoat and fumbled for her key, preserving a punishing silence.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ he said. He looked ghostly under the purple street lighting and his eyes were anxious.

  She said, ‘Look—forget everything I said, will you? I was in a state. I’m ashamed to have troubled you.’

  He winced as though she had bruised him. ‘You shouldn’t be,’ he said.

  They went into the entrance hall, she opened the flat door and they heard the gramophone playing.

  Frederick said, ‘Is that the baby-sitter?’

  ‘No. The woman in the ground-floor flat keeps an eye on Martin when we go out. We don’t encourage her to sit there because she drinks all the gin. Johnny must have come home early.’

  ‘Oh.’ He hovered uncertainly at the top of the basement stairs. For a moment they glanced at each other guiltily, like startled lovers. As they went down the stairs, Mary said in an unnecessarily loud voice, ‘Come in for a drink, won’t you?’

  Johnny got up as they went into the drawing-room. ‘Fred,’ he said, with unaffected, smiling delight and to Mary, ‘I wondered where you were.’ He did not speak accusingly but as if he had been, simply, lonely, sitting in the brightly lit room, an empty glass in his hand, waiting for her to come home. For a moment she felt the prick of guilty sadness you feel for someone else’s disappointment and then she saw that he had not, in fact, been alone. The lavatory cistern flushed and a man came through the door that led to the bathroom, a short, lively-looking man with a knobbly irregular face, dark bright eyes, dark tufts of hair on his cheekbones, a blue chin. She recognized him with a rush of pleasure that surprised her and momentarily eclipsed every other emotion. ‘Why it’s you,’ she said.

  Charles came up to her, amused and a little stirred by her warm, startled smile. He had remembered her simply as a pretty, quite attractive girl who was Johnny’s wife and therefore of no interest, in any other context, to a casual male. Now, her entrance with another man and her bright, unguarded welcome—as if they had been old friends alone in the room—woke a sudden thrust of excitement in him. Wet with rain, her hair sleeked damply back from her pale, rather high forehead, she looked nearly beautiful to him; perhaps, he thought wryly, because her bedraggled appearance made her seem more accessible. He had always been nervous of women who looked too tidy, too self-assured, and not only because he had found them cold in bed. They disturbed some deep spring of conceit in him; he needed to dominate in sexual relationships. He took her hand. ‘How are you? And your son, who is not like your husband?’ He was pleased, both by her quick laugh and the look of shyness that followed it, as if the intimacy in the clumsy little joke had embarrassed her a little.

  ‘We’re both terribly well,’ she said, and turned to Frederick, standing just inside the door and twirling his shabby hat in his hand. She introduced him, Johnny offered drinks. His eyes had a fixed, bright look as if he had been drinking a lot. Frederick said yes, he would love one. His acceptance was a measure of his discomfort, he didn’t drink spirits normally. He took the glass and sat on the sofa, sipping his drink like medicine.

  Johnny touched Mary’s sleeve. ‘You’re wet through.’ She nodded, slipped off her jacket and threw it onto a chair, not looking at him. She said, ‘I didn’t expect you back so early,’ caught Charles’s speculative look and coloured slightly. ‘Wasn’t the party fun?’

  ‘It was just a business do.’

  She looked at him then and said, quite sharply Charles thought, ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘A shipping firm. Party for a retiring President, something like that. Julian took me along. There was someone he wanted me to meet. As a matter of fact, I ran into Charles. We decided to cut it short and come home.’

  ‘I went to see Frederick. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’

  Her nervously formal apology included Charles. He settled himself comfortably in a chair, lit a small Dutch cigar and said, ‘It was a terrible party. Everyone talked about their golf averages.’ He looked, in spite of his dark, English suit, so very European and intense that Mary thought it was difficult to imagine that he would know what a golf average was. He went on, ‘It was the sort of party one is always enormously surprised to find oneself at. Beluga and gin and tax evasion.’

  Johnny said, ‘Lord Addlestone brought you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. I think it was a reward for a good boy. I did a long, dull memorandum for him last month. I don’t suppose he ever read it.’

  ‘I didn’t know you went in for that sort of thing,’ Johnny said. ‘Advising industrial firms and so on. If you’re interested, I might be able to put you in touch with one or two people.’

  Charles shook his head. ‘No—I like jam on my bread but not at that price. I only did it to please my uncle—he’s a business associate of Addlestone’s. It was entirely mechanical and very boring.’ He smiled broadly, showing two gold teeth. It was a very gentle rebuff and Mary was suddenly ashamed that Johnny had provoked it. He had meant well, but it was ridiculous of him to talk as if he had fat livings in his gift. She got the feeling that for some reason he felt himself superior to Charles: she remembered that when they had been at Fitchet, Johnny had been extra polite to him, the way most people, most nice people that is, are polite to those who are not quite their equals.

  Frederick said, ‘Are you Charles Benjamin Franks?’ He looked interested, slightly awed.

  ‘Well, yes. At least, I suppose so.’

  ‘I read an article of yours that interested me very much,’ Frederick said and went on to ask a number of questions that Charles answered perfectly politely but briefly, as if Frederick’s earnest-student manner discomfited him.

  While they talked, Johnny got up and stood by the fire, playing with a Dresden figure on the mantelshelf. Finally he said abruptly, ‘What does success feel like, Charles?’

  The question had a curious flavour. Charles frowned, considering what it was. ‘I don’t know. Success is just a word, isn’t it?’

  Frederick said, ‘So is failure.’ He smiled with uneasy brightness. ‘If you go into the back streets of Streatham, you’ll find no one has ever heard of either.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Johnny blew a speck of dust off the china shepherd and replaced it carefully beside the clock. ‘It’s not something I ever thought of until the other day.’ He looked at Charles. ‘I had lunch with Climper. D’you remember him? He was at the re-union party.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wanted to sell me a policy.’ Johnny went on, slowly, thoughtfully, but with a rumbling undertone of anger. ‘He was one of the best squadron leaders we ever had. D’you know what he’s doing now? Peddling insurance from door to door like a hawker.’ He poured himself another drink without offering one to anyone else: Charles realized with a shock that this discourtesy was extraordinary. Johnny went on, his eyes shining with outrage, ‘Poor old Climper. That’s what I thought when I left him. And then I thought—I was walking down the street and it was like being kicked in the stomach—does he say, Poor old Prothero?’ He stared round the room.

  Frederick shifted uneasily on the sofa, and got out his pipe. Charles glanced at Mary and saw her double her fists in her lap.

  ‘It’s an uncomfortable business—to see yourself mirrored in other men,’ Johnny said. He drank his whisky in two quick gulps and paced restlessly up and down the room. The others looked carefully at the walls, the ceiling, the floor—any
where but at him.

  ‘You know when you’ve climbed a mountain,’ he burst out. ‘You get to the top and you’re aching all over and your lungs are bursting, but it’s a fine feeling. Nothing else like it in the world. You’ve been stretched to the limit—used everything, your brain, your body—that’s how one wants to feel. And how often does it happen?’ He stumbled on the edge of the carpet and regained his balance with difficulty. ‘It’s this ghastly feeling that so much goes to waste … so much talent, so much courage.…’

  Frederick cleared his throat loudly, scarlet with anxiety but clearly prepared to argue, Charles saw, as if Johnny were in a state to be argued with. ‘Courage is never wasted,’ he moralized sedately. ‘You need more, really, in private life than you need climbing a mountain.’ His pulpit tone was absurdly funny but no one laughed.

  ‘Life is one long process of waste,’ Johnny said. ‘You should know that, in your job.’

  He stood in the centre of the room, swaying slightly but looking very handsome with his fair hair untidy and the faint, ruddy tingeing on his cheekbones that always came when he was excited. Looking at him, Mary felt suddenly that there was some kind of force or strength in him that was not so much wasted but, as he clearly felt himself, unused. For the first time she was sorry for him with that dreadful, aching pity that excludes love and under the pity there was fear, not defined, but lurking like a shadow in the corner.

  Chapter Eight

  Mary woke up with a feeling of freedom, almost light-heartedness. After the others had left the night before, the situation had seemed unresolvable. She had lain awake for hours, panic swelling monstrously in the dark, listening to the rain and Johnny’s regular breathing beside her. But the simplicity of Frederick’s suggestion must have worked on her unconscious while she slept. She woke and knew, as if she had planned it herself, that she was going to do what he had said.