by Nina Bawden
She said dully, ‘Is it such an awful thing, to be conventional? If I liked Julian, I’d never trust him. Can’t you find something better to do than getting mixed up with his sort?’
‘No, by God I can’t,’ he said violently, and her heart jumped. She had the feeling it was about the most intimate thing he had ever said to her. She felt as if she had just ripped a piece of plaster off an open wound.
‘Surely that’s nonsense, isn’t it?’ she pleaded. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t a good thing to work for Lester. I’m sorry if I over-persuaded you. But you could get another job.’
‘Doing what? Writing rhyming jingles to persuade fools to drug themselves with aspirin? Wangling expense accounts? My dearest girl—I want to run my own life.’
‘Will you be running your own life with Julian, or just making his easier?’ She did not like the way she was behaving but something forced her on. ‘He told me you’d make a good front man.’
His eyes narrowed into golden slits. ‘We’re going into partnership.’
‘Does that mean he wants money?’
He looked disconcerted for a moment. ‘I may have to get some money together.’ This was a phrase he often used and that had always annoyed her. It implied that money was not something you worked for.
‘Do you mean you’re going to ask Christine?’
He went to the cupboard and got out the gin and two glasses.
She said, ‘Johnny, you can’t. When she was here the other day, she told me she wanted to put some money into a trust for Martin’s education. I think it was meant as a hint that it was all we were to expect from her.’ She had the unhappy feeling that she was abusing a confidence. He said nothing, pouring out the drinks with a studied concentration. She said, ‘It’s not fair. Because she can’t refuse you. Or won’t refuse you.’
He said with controlled patience, ‘Look, love, I’m not going to bully Mother, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’m simply going to suggest a sound, water-tight investment. It is that. I’ve taken legal advice—I asked Charles, as a matter of fact. It’s an import and export business that went bankrupt last year with a tax loss of some forty thousand pounds. Julian’s bought a controlling interest and is building it up—he’s got plenty of contracts. It’s the sort of business that’s bound to expand—for example, the Government lifted restrictions on the export of strategic materials at the beginning of the year. Of course, we’ll be dealing with small stuff to start with, but it’ll be much more productive than a trust fund.’ He drained his glass and smiled at her. ‘Why did she suggest that, anyway? Does she think I’m incapable of educating my own son?’
He spoke with amused indignation and, for a moment, the idea did seem ridiculous. His face had a buoyant, boyish look. All the old cant phrases rolled through her mind in conventional procession. He had only to ‘find his feet’, ‘grasp the nettle’, ‘seize the moment’. She had a beautiful, tingling hope that this was true. She thought, ashamed, that it was as easy to undervalue people you loved as to over-rate them.
She said, ‘I suppose she does think that,’ and smiled to reassure him.
He said nothing for a moment and then turned brusquely away from her. He said, in a low voice, ‘Oh God, let me keep my temper.’
She was half prepared to laugh but when he looked at her, she was frightened. He was very white, trembling with a held-in anger, lines etched his mouth and seemed to make his nose thinner so that it stood out like a beak. He had once said, during one of their early rows, that he was afraid to lose his temper in case he became violent. At the time she had thought this was a kind of boast, a dramatic overstatement out of a hallucinatory world of strong, silent heroes where he figured, sternly upright and splendid. Now, looking at him, she realized that he would never say a thing like that for effect and that in the back of her mind she had always known it and that it had frightened her. The reason she had not confronted him with the truth before was not shame or delicacy but a deep, unadmitted fear. His gentle restraint was deliberate, tight-wound, the gentleness of a man who knows how terrible the alternative can be.
She said, ‘Johnny …’ and then fear was drowned in a wave of engulfing pity. He was hurt in his pride in a way she could never be, for to him pride was important, an invincible belief in his own dignity. Where most people would have shrugged their shoulders wryly at the suggestion that they could not afford to educate their sons, he was humiliated almost beyond bearing. He had been promised so much, he was wide open to disappointment on every side. ‘Oh damn everything,’ he said in a choking voice and went from the room.
She caught him up at the top of the stairs. He had his raincoat over his arm. ‘Johnny—for Heaven’s sake.’ She felt pity for him still but there was exasperation lying like a brick at the heart of it.
‘Don’t come after me,’ he said. ‘I’m no good to you or to anyone.’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said and felt suddenly excited. It seemed that there was a taut knot of tension inside her and that to quarrel with him would release it. ‘If you knew how ludicrous you looked—standing there with that glowering, righteous stare. And over something so small, so petty …’ She caught his arm but he shook it off as if it were dirty. ‘What’s wrong in your mother wanting to pay for Martin’s school? There’s no ignominy in not being rich enough to do it, surely? And we aren’t poor in any real sense, after all.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said haughtily, with a closed look on his face that made her want to hit him with all her strength. But it was the truth. She didn’t understand him, she couldn’t reach him.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand, either, why you should be so dead keen to turn Martin into a facsimile of yourself. Why turn him into a cocky public-school boy who’s going to expect the red carpet to be nicely laid out for him? Hasn’t it done you enough harm? Do you have to stamp him, set him apart? …’ She heard her voice rising shrilly and tried, self-consciously, to introduce a lighter note, ‘… give him ideas above his station? I don’t want to turn my son into a disillusioned gentleman with one foot in a club in St. James’s and the other in the gutter.’
‘Shut up.’ His face was a pale, stiff mask in the half gloom of the stairs. ‘You should see what you look like when you yell at me like a fishwife. Your face slips out of focus like a drunk’s.’
She gasped. ‘Oh … oh … I would rather you hit me …’ She flew at him, he caught her wrists and held them.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ he said. He looked shocked, and she saw this was true. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, he had simply been ashamed, because she had so little control. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,’ he said in an appalled voice.
‘That’s all right.’ She leaned limply against the wall, anger had left her quite suddenly and she felt a sense of release that was almost sexual. It was the way quarrels often affected her. When they were over she felt peaceful, luxuriously sad.
Johnny went out. While he was away, she bathed and changed, smoothing her body with powder and brushing her hair for a long time until it flew crackling round her face when she combed it. After a little she felt renewed, full of fight. Her thoughts were clear and happy, they flew like arrows, like the electricity in her hair. She wanted to do something with the energy that had suddenly accumulated inside her. She was not helpless: there must be some adequate arguments to back up her distrust of Julian. Johnny could do nothing without Christine’s money and Christine would certainly insist that Lester should be consulted first.
Mary decided that she would insist on it too. The thought of Lester comforted her like an easy chair. Instantly, she dismissed her dislike of him, his dislike of Johnny. She had no idea on what terms Johnny had parted from his uncle but the family solidarity was too strong for there to be any definite break. Lester’s sense of duty would compel him to shield his nephew from a dicey business venture. She moved about the flat, her lips moving, making little gestures with her hands as sh
e prepared her arguments and then, on an impulse, she telephoned Charles Franks.
He sounded surprised, then cautious. Yes, Johnny had talked to him about the export firm. They had only discussed it in the most general terms. He wasn’t really qualified to give an opinion and he had recommended a good solicitor to go into the legal side of it. He spoke with a slightly over-elaborate disinterestedness that seemed to arise from something more than the ordinary dislike of a professional man for giving off-the-cuff advice to his friends. She wondered how he felt about Julian and did not quite like to ask him. Their conversation tailed off with an obvious bewilderment on Charles’s side and a sense of ineptitude on hers: she realized that she had not properly worked out in her own mind what she had hoped to learn from him.
Then he said, after an interval, ‘It would be nice if you would lunch with me one day.’
He spoke in a stiff, almost stilted way, sounding unexpectedly nervous. He had a slow, exact way of talking that made him seem more foreign over the telephone than when they had met face to face. The invitation surprised and then stimulated her.
She said, ‘That’s awfully kind. Yes, I’d love to.’
He said, ‘When? You couldn’t manage tomorrow?’
She looked at her diary. The page was blank. ‘No. Not tomorrow.’ She went on with unusual provocativeness. ‘Not this week at all, I’m afraid.’
The disappointment in his ‘Oh’, flattered her.
‘I could manage almost any day next week. Not Monday.’
‘Tuesday, then?’
‘That would be lovely.’
His voice became briskly competent. ‘What about The Gay Cavalier. Greek Street. One o’clock?’
‘Yes.’
‘Until Tuesday, then.’
‘Until Tuesday.…’
She put the receiver down with a vague, pleasant feeling of guilt as if at some childish naughtiness.
When Johnny came back, she was still in an energetic, happy mood. They sat over beer and cheese in the kitchen and talked quite calmly. She found herself thinking that to anyone peering through the modern plate-glass window—three times as large as the original one to trap as much light as possible in the basement—they must look a very happy couple, talking over the day together. She felt she was acting on a lighted stage. She pushed back her dark hair, tilted her head on one side and smiled over-steadily. Johnny watched her with a troubled look.
He had promised not to decide anything definitely, indeed, it was impossible to do so, until he had talked to his mother. He agreed, with a shade more stiffness, that it would be sensible to ask Lester’s advice.
‘Though I don’t like it. I hate it, in fact. It looks as if I’m incapable of making up my own mind. But if it will make you happier …’
‘It won’t. I just think it’s wise. Lester knows more about this sort of thing than you do.’
He sighed deeply and she felt guiltily responsible. She got up and went round to his side of the table and stroked his hair, leaning against him and pressing her breasts against his shoulder. He moved, as if uncomfortable, and stood up. She thought for a moment he was going to push her away. She closed her eyes and clung to his arm. ‘Don’t,’ she said softly.
He looked down at her, unsmiling, and then bent his head and kissed her. She opened her mouth and clung to him, wanting pain, not tenderness, dragging his limp hand from his side and pressing it against her breast, longing for it to bruise her. For a moment his fingers responded; she had a wild hope that this time it would be different. But he disengaged himself gently, murmuring, without looking at her, something about lights and uncurtained windows. She stood trembling, her breasts and thighs, her whole body aching, while he turned his back on her and methodically cleared the table and put the dirty glasses in the sink, the cheese in the cupboard.
She left him abruptly and went into the bedroom, taking off her gown and getting into bed without turning on the light. She lay flat on her stomach, her face pressed into the pillow, listening to his movements about the room, the chink as he took his loose change out of his pocket and placed it on the dressing-table, the scrape as he pulled the chair away from the wall to fold his trousers across the back, the tiny, barely perceptible sound as he wound up his watch. Suddenly, she twisted round in the bed and switched on the bedside lamp. He blinked with surprise, standing naked, on the rug, tall and white and slender, the golden hairs glinting on his long thighs and in the pyramid on his belly.
‘I wanted to look at you,’ she said.
He smiled self-consciously; she saw that his chief—almost his only emotion, was embarrassment.
‘You’re nice to look at,’ she said, but she switched off the light and felt ashamed. She lay still as he got into bed beside her. She had learned the rules: while he stroked her gently she must lie passive or stroke him back as gently; he allowed her to feel him grow against her flesh but she must not touch him there. He did not speak a word and, nervously loving, she tried to be what he expected her to be, forcing herself not to respond too strongly because it had so often seemed to make him impotent as if her desire inhibited him because he could not match it. She thought, hating herself for thinking it, that he made love exactly as he must have run the mile at school: when he came into the straight, his only thought was to finish in less time than he had done before.
He fell asleep almost at once. She lay awake, feeling a mild, sad disgust—with herself, not with him—and fighting a queer constriction in her throat. She listened to his deep, rhythmical breathing, then lifted herself on her elbow and tried to make out his features in the dim light from the street outside. She touched his forehead with the tip of one cold finger and he stirred and smiled in his sleep. Her own lust suddenly terrified her, like a painful or disfiguring illness. She sat up in bed, hugging her knees, and wondered helplessly if there was something wrong with her.
Chapter Ten
Christine had gone into a nursing home in Bloomsbury. ‘For observation, dear,’ she explained when Mary went to see her carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums and a copy of the latest biography. Her attitude precluded sympathy; not only did she not invite it, she actively repelled it. She gave no hint of what was wrong with her, dismissing it as ‘some stupid trouble which might as well be cleared up now as later’.
Mary admired her dignified reticence but could not help remembering her own mother, a plump, lively woman who sang a wobbly soprano in the Methodist choir’s annual rendering of Messiah and whose favourite occupation was the recital of her hospital adventures. When Mary had been a child, she used to come home from school and find her mother sitting with her cronies round a pot of dark, stewed tea, discussing the various troubles, usually gynaecological, that afflicted them all. There had been a zest about those tea parties, not just a crude fascination but a lovely excitement at the mysteries of birth and death. And they were mysteries; to be ‘under the doctor’entitled you to a certain reverence, something like that attached to a novice in a holy order. The doctor was always a distant, God-like creature in a white coat who made kind jokes on his weekly ward round and hid from you the true nature of your illness because, of course, you couldn’t be expected to understand the functions of your own body.
Christine, of course, would know her doctor personally—or, anyway, his father. He would be Sir Somebody-or-other, knighted for his services to a member of the royal family and Christine would regard him as simply a superior technician, called in to repair her body with much the same attitude as she would call in the plumber to mend a burst pipe. He would naturally defer to her, she was someone to be reckoned with; she might be old and ill but she still knew her own importance. And though she was, on her terms, poor, she was still able to be ill in comfort with a telephone and a private nurse. She could no more have endured the kindly bonhomie of a public ward than she could have walked naked down Knights-bridge: some people might be able to put up with that sort of thing, but not she, nor anyone she knew.
When Mary went into her
room, she was sitting up against the pillows in a practical Jaeger bedjacket, occupied with a pile of letters spread out on the counterpane. She was a voluminous correspondent, she even answered picture postcards from her friends holidaying in Rome, in Venice, the Swiss lakes.
Mary said, when they had talked for a little about the weather, ‘Christine, I’m sorry Johnny has been bothering you just now.’ She blurted this out, feeling clumsy and rude. Christine frowned, took off her glasses and looked out of the window at the grey rooftops and the yellow sky.
‘You mean about the trust fund?’ She gave a little laugh. ‘I see now that it was foolish of me to suggest it. It was just old lady nerves, that’s all.’
‘Not in the least. It was immensely kind of you. And an excellent idea after all.’
‘But much more sensible to find a really profitable use for one’s bit of capital,’ she broke in, quite sternly, sitting more upright. She looked thinner and older and her eyes stood out with a kind of pale predatoriness like the eyes of an old bird hunched on a perch in the zoo. ‘It’s a bad thing to have capital tied up. I’m only glad Johnny has found something really promising at last. I wondered at the time whether it was a good idea to work for Lester. But of course, I can see that without money he really had very little choice. We really had nothing to set him up with but so many young people seem to start from scratch nowadays. When I married, things were so different.’
Christine had taken a sizeable dowry to her marriage bed as well as all the linen, all the silver. Even now most of the young women she knew, the children of her friends, would probably do the same. Mary had found it astonishing that there were still parents who expected to give their married daughters an allowance, buy them a house or a car.