by Nina Bawden
Confusion returned, briefly, at breakfast. Martin had been kissed and sent to school and they sat, drinking a last cup of coffee and smoking cigarettes. Everything seemed bright and almost aggressively normal as in a photograph of well-fed people in a magazine advertisement for easy living. For a moment she almost persuaded herself that there was nothing wrong at all. In a moment, Johnny would get up, yawn, pick up his briefcase and umbrella and kiss her good-bye like any other husband.
It was exactly what he did do. The yawn. The kiss. ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I must have been a damn bore.’
‘You shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.’
‘I don’t know what came over me. D’you know, I don’t think I’ve ever been drunk before?’
She said, ‘There has to be a first time for everything.’
He grinned. ‘I suppose so.’ He picked up his briefcase, his umbrella. ‘Good-bye, love,’ he said.
She waited until she heard the door close. Then she put on her raincoat and went after him. It was raining, a cold, fine mizzle. Johnny walked erect under the old-fashioned black umbrella that he had inherited from his grandfather, straight to the tube station. He folded the umbrella, put some coins in a ticket machine and went through the barrier. He was a long way ahead of her, going down the escalator and she was afraid of losing him and then afraid that he would turn and see her. The platform was crowded. She stood by a weighing machine, out of sight in case he should look round but he stood upright and still, his briefcase clasped in front of him, staring at a Whitbread advertisement on the other side of the tunnel. The train rattled in and she chose the carriage behind him, standing where she could see him through two panels of glass, strap-hanging and reading the headlines of his folded newspaper. There was an empty seat beside him, he glanced round and motioned a man standing next to him to sit there. He was an oldish man, with a nervous, submissive face and bowed shoulders; as he sat down he looked startled, as if no one had ever offered him a seat on a train before.
Johnny got out at Aldgate. The rain had stopped, the gutters streamed, there was a bleak, high sun. The pavements were crowded with men in caps and slip-shod women in steel curlers and bedroom slippers, middle-aged at thirty, gossiping outside the shops. There were some pretty girls, very young and cheaply smart in thin coats and high-heeled patent shoes with ankle straps. One girl, with dark, made-up eyes like a Disney fawn, looked at Johnny. She nudged her companion and they both stopped and stared after him. For a second, Mary saw him as they did, as something fixed and godlike, striding purposefully through the aimless, anonymous crowds, his head high and hopeful.
He turned off the main road and she followed him along a narrow street with tall, blind warehouses on either side. She was more nervous here, there was no cover, but he didn’t look back. He marched briskly, as if to military music, and wheeled round a corner. Now the street was empty, she started to run. If she lost him, she would never find the courage to do this again and the fact that she had done it once would darken the deception between them. She had no idea what she would do when she finally tracked him down but she ran after him with a sense of purpose, almost of exaltation.
She reached the corner and saw him, half-way down a wider and busier street with shops and a small, open market at the end. Then he vanished. She hurried after him, marking the place where he had disappeared by a small green van parked outside. It was a tailor’s shop with a pressing machine in the window. Peering in, she saw rails of half-finished suits with tacking marks on the shoulders and, moving slowly in the steamy gloom, a fat man in shirtsleeves. There was an open door at the side which did not lead to the shop but to a narrow flight of dusty, linoleum-covered stairs. At the side of the door was a brass plate with bells and several cards jammed roughly into slots. Two of them were illegible, one was a window-cleaning firm and the fourth said Abba Ltd. Exports. There was an air of shabbiness and failure about the uncleaned brass and the dirty white cards.
Opposite the building there was a small café with the day’s menus chalked on a blackboard outside and a ragged piece of net curtaining tacked to the lower half of the window. Egg and chips, bacon and chips, sausages and chips. She tried to see Johnny, sitting at one of the tables inside, eating greasy chips and drinking cups of brown, stewed tea. Suddenly her presence in the street seemed unutterably sordid. She was horrified by what she had done, she no longer wanted to know anything, she wanted to forget what she had found out already. She ran, in a black vacuum of panic, away from the tailor’s shop, along the narrow street, past the high, warehouse walls. The breath caught in her throat, she ran as if there was something dark and terrible behind her. She stumbled into the main street and collided with Julian, blundering into the broad, firm expanse of his waistcoat. His hands caught her shoulders and held her.
He was not alone. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘this is Theodore Kranz. Mr. Kranz, Mrs. Prothero.’
Though Mr. Kranz was short and plump, he had a martial air.
He shook hands with Mary, but spiritually he clicked his heels. His smile displayed beautiful teeth.
‘It is particularly nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘Though so unexpected.’ His smile broadened unbelievably, exposing unstained black molars. His eye teeth were very white and carnivorous. After a moment, Mary tore her gaze away from them and discovered his face, pleasant and rather stupid. He had large, pale eyes like a kind of boiled sweet and there was a blue scar down the side of his face. He said, ‘I have been looking forward to meeting Mr. Prothero’s wife.’
‘Do you know Johnny?’ she said idiotically.
‘I had the pleasure of meeting him last night,’ he said. ‘Mr. Cloutsham was kind enough to introduce me. We only talked for a short while but I found him a very fine man. The kind of man we need in business.’ He flashed the machinery of his mouth at Mary with an absurd, but kind intensity. ‘I hope to have the pleasure of meeting him again, quite soon.’
Julian was watching her face. He said quickly, ‘Kranz—do you mind? I’d like a word with Mrs. Prothero.’
‘Of course.’ He bowed his head slightly and looked stiff.
‘We’ll lunch together,’ Julian said. His ingratiating tone surprised Mary. Mr. Kranz did not look particularly important. ‘One o’clock? I’ll come to your office.’
‘I shall be delighted. That will give me time to see what I can arrange for your customer in Pakistan.’ The boiled eyes twinkled as if something in this remark amused him. He raised his hand at Mary in a sort of benediction and the two men moved away a little. Julian said something in an undertone and Kranz laughed shortly. Then he walked off, jaunty and bald-headed, moving with short, decisive steps like a dancer.
Julian said, ‘Queer little fish, isn’t he? Fascinating history. He’s a Pole—escaped from Siberia and went into the Polish Navy. The Germans caught him but he got away and landed up in wireless intelligence or something.’ He spoke with hearty cheerfulness but his expression was vaguely uneasy. She thought he was talking for the sake of something to say.
‘What does he do now?’
‘He’s a shipsbroker. Useful chap to know in other ways, too. He worked for an export firm in Warsaw before the war.’
‘Oh.’
His thick eyelids drooped at her. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Mary.’ He spoke with abrupt authority, gripped her arm and marched her firmly into a Lyons’. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cup of coffee in a minute.’
‘I don’t want a cup of coffee.’ She was shaking with rage. ‘Johnny’s working with you, isn’t he?’
‘You know he isn’t. Not yet, anyway. But that’s not exactly what I wanted to talk about.’
‘Why not? Isn’t it important? If he’s in some sort of dreary little mess …’
‘He’s not in any sort of mess. And if he was, you’re not his wet nurse.’ She opened her mouth to protest but he held up his thick white hand in a magisterial gesture like a traffic policeman. ‘Look, sweetie—I’m f
ond of old Johnny. Give me credit for that, will you? I’ve known him a long time. And I don’t like what’s been happening to him.’ His tone was sentimental and histrionic but it compelled her attention. It was just possible that he was sincere.
‘What do you mean?’
He leaned forward and covered her hand with his own. He was always touching her—he usually kissed her when they met—but never as if he were making a pass at her. She was reminded of the way cats will always jump on the laps of people who dislike them. He said, ‘I mean—he’s got the ball at his feet. Just give him a chance to kick it, there’s a good girl.’
She saw that he had no idea how completely she had been kept in the dark. She said belligerently, ‘I hate riddles.’
‘All right. He took that job with dear Uncle Lester because you wanted him to, didn’t he? And what did it lead to? He didn’t even make a decent living out of it, did he? And he’s got a natural taste for the lordly life. Does he still order his writing paper from Harrods?’
‘We live well enough,’ she said coldly.
‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ He grinned. ‘But you can’t live on a salary nowadays—you haven’t done, have you?’ He paused. ‘Let me tell you something, Mary. It’s not nice to be genteel poor. I know.’
His voice had changed, he was no longer smiling. She saw an intimate revelation trembling on his lips and felt a shamed hostility.
‘My mamma had money. The trouble was, she was a bitch. She decamped with a Greek when I was four. My father was a country doctor near Aberystwyth but at that time country doctors didn’t make much, he was keeping his old dad in a nursing home and he was a sick man himself. Life was one long procession of bills—mostly for the fearful middle-class business of keeping up a front. I went to a dreary little private school. It was run by a man who’d sat in mustard gas in the first war and had a tin bottom and a filthy temper, probably because half the bills were never paid.’
‘I’ve read about that sort of school.’
‘I bet you have.’ His eyes regarded her coldly. ‘You’re a bright girl, Mary. All right—you know it all. You read it in a book. But here’s one thing you didn’t read. Boys didn’t often get scholarships from that school—they didn’t often pass into a reputable one. But I got a scholarship. And when my father heard, do you know what he did? He cried. Blubbered like a snivelling brat in short trousers. And when he’d finished crying, he made me kneel down with him in his horrible little consulting-room and give thanks to God. His son was going to be a gentleman. As if I cared a tuppenny damn. All I wanted was a bit of money in my pocket and a decent bicycle—I didn’t want to mix with the right people and learn to speak with a hot potato in my mouth though I did learn to do that fast enough. But I couldn’t see the point. My poor old Dad was a gent—he had an accent so plummy most of his patients couldn’t understand him and could quote Greek till the cows came home, but it didn’t pay the bills. It wouldn’t pay my bills either—I found that out as soon as I’d got to this marvellous school and seen all the other boys with their parents rolling up in Bentleys and their holidays in Switzerland and all the nice presents tumbling off the Christmas tree. I hated them all.’ He stopped and looked very slightly abashed. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve bored you. I suppose you’re waiting for the commercial. It’s just that you need an awful lot of lolly to live like a gentleman.’
She believed him but she felt that his telling her all this was a kind of bribe, a trick, to persuade her to like him. ‘Maybe. But why should you care about Johnny?’
‘Friendship, sweetie, what else?’ His mouth smiled but his eyes were cold as the winter sea. ‘As I said, I’m fond of him. I want him to have a chance. And not just money-wise.’ His voice deepened suddenly, he spoke with a tight, controlled anger. ‘I don’t want to see him endlessly subservient to some diseased little man like Simpson who enjoys humiliating him. He’s got to strike out on his own—make a success. If he doesn’t, he’ll get bitter, he’ll turn into one of those failed ex-officers who prop up hotel bars and talk about the wogs and throw their money about.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, but she felt an icy nudge of fear. ‘What can he do?’ she said helplessly. ‘He doesn’t know anything about business.’
‘You mean you don’t. Maybe he doesn’t either, but he’ll learn. He’s got the right kind of background. People like him, trust him, you know. He’s an excellent front man.’
‘You mean he’ll be useful to you,’ she said flatly. He shrugged his shoulders. She went on, ‘I just don’t see him as a gentleman adventurer, that’s all.’
He laughed, not very pleasantly. ‘You don’t see him as anything except a nice professional man with a nice, professional label, do you? You’d like to be able to say, “my husband is an accountant, or a solicitor, or a doctor …” when you’re gossiping with Mrs. Snooks over the garden fence. You want a nice, suburban husband bringing home the dibs, mowing the lawn on Sunday, bathing the kids—if he gets a rise, there’ll be a bit more warmth in the Saturday sex as a result.’ His mouth set in a distasteful sneer. ‘You’re like every other woman. You’ve got a religious respect for the monthly salary, the pension scheme.’
Tears welled up in her eyes, she felt stupid and gauche and ignorant. She said stubbornly, ‘How do you know that isn’t what he wants? He had a monthly salary in the Air Force, didn’t he?’
‘He was flying then.’
‘Yes.’ She admitted unhappily that she had tried to forget how much that had meant to Johnny and was ashamed because it was Julian who had reminded her. She looked at him uneasily, trying to crush down her instinctive dislike, wondering if it was fair to doubt his affection for Johnny. What frightened her about Julian, she decided, was a kind of vast carelessness. He might, for the moment, be genuinely, deeply concerned about Johnny, but it was a spasmodic concern. He was the sort of man who could involve himself with energy and passion in the life of a friend but only for a brief period: afterwards, whether he had helped them or smashed them up, he would forget them equally easily. But he was clearly concerned now—moved, almost. His eyes were bright, sentimentally intent.
‘I wish you’d trust me, Mary. I do understand Johnny, you know.’ Then he widened his eyes comically as if afraid to be too serious. ‘Oh—he’s a much nicer person than me. I grant you that. He nothing sordid did, or mean, upon that memorable scene. Unquote. Etcetera. I’m not sneering—really—that attracts me, the way a virgin attracts a dirty old man.’ He smiled with disarming pleasure at his own joke and then looked solemn, like a man switching funny masks at a party. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how he ticks. We’re alike in all sorts of ways. We neither of us take kindly to authority. We like to control our own lives. We’re both—romantics, you might say.’
She said, ‘You’ve got about as much in common as Don Quixote and Al Capone.’
‘I doubt if either of us is of so large a stature.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Let him have this chance, Mary. It is up to you. He won’t do anything you don’t approve of.’
Hysteria bubbled up inside her. She felt she couldn’t go on any longer, sparring in the dark. She had a terrible, driving desire to tell him the truth, that she didn’t know what he was talking about, that Johnny had told her nothing. She controlled herself with an effort, partly out of pride, and partly because she knew how he would respond. He would be kind, sympathetic—but his sympathy was a debased currency. He would enjoy the situation too much, lap it up with a kind of eager, womanish greed.
He said solicitously, ‘Is anything the matter?’
She shook her head and he patted her hand. ‘All right, you needn’t tell me. You’re very loyal, Mary.’
He spoke with jocular condescension like someone presenting a dunce with the booby prize.
Chapter Nine
Johnny said, ‘So you followed me on purpose. To spy on me.’
His face was pale and outraged, he flung the evening paper down on the table and it lay like a gauntlet bet
ween them.
She said, ‘I had to. I couldn’t bear it. I knew you weren’t working for Lester.’
A muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘When did you find that out?’
‘Last week. The day Martin cut his cheek. I rang the office.’
He expelled his breath in a long sigh. ‘I wondered about that. But I was so sure that if you had found out, you’d have told me.’
‘I’m sorry. But you pushed me into it, didn’t you?’ He raised his eyebrows and she went on desolately, ‘I see now—it was an awful thing to do.’
‘I’m glad you realize that.’
‘Though why should it be?’ she said, goaded. ‘After all—you lied to me.’
‘Believe me, I’m deeply ashamed of that. Haven’t I apologized enough? Do you want me to grovel?’
He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes like someone waking from a bad dream. ‘Oh—damn it all. I am sorry. It was despicable. I thought you’d worry so much if I told you. I hate to see you worried.’
‘Oh.’
They looked at each other across chaos. She saw a flash of fear tighten his mouth, then it was gone and she had no idea what he was thinking. She said, ‘You’re working with Julian, aren’t you? Why couldn’t you have told me that?’
‘I tried to, once or twice. But it never seemed the right moment.’ She recognized with a dull sense of failure that he had been afraid to tell her. He lifted his head challengingly, his voice was suddenly stern and unmodulated. ‘I know I was wrong. There’s no excuse. Except the poor one—that it was all so terribly vague and you’d have condemned it out of hand. You’ve never liked Julian. He’s not conventional enough for you.’
The sneer was unlike him. Only a strong emotion could have provoked it. She saw, helplessly, that she was up against something stronger than the ordinary loyalty Johnny would always feel for his friends. He had an undiscriminating respect for experiences not his own—a delicacy that made him very easy to cheat. It was probably one of the reasons he stuck up for Julian, admiring him for qualities of grit and gutter brightness that he had never needed and so set, perhaps, too high a rating on.