by Nina Bawden
‘You mean we should do nothing?’ Clara said in a shocked voice.
‘You could give him some money if you want. That would be quite the best thing to do. Just send some money to the hospital. You could write a letter. But no address. Or he might send it back.’
‘That would be cowardly,’ Johnny said loftily. ‘After all, I’m responsible, in a way. If I’d let him leave the carriage when he wanted to, at least he wouldn’t have been hurt. To send money—it’s like buying off one’s conscience.’
His tone rebuked her, set her apart, stamped her, she thought grimly, as a person without a proper sense of social or moral responsibility. She said, ‘Is your precious conscience so important? And anyway, wouldn’t you be doing the same thing if you badgered him with solicitors? It wouldn’t bring him any comfort. Can you imagine Rudge being able to talk to him, even? Rudge can only communicate with men who play golf—or who went to school with him.’
Johnny said nothing. The taxi stopped at a traffic light and the red glare lit up his face, half turned away and staring out of the window. He said softly, ‘Oh, damn, damn, damn. I can’t bear it. Those ghastly people—to think that sort of thing can happen.’
He leaned his head on his fist as if he were suffering a physical pain. They were out of the town now and driving through the Kentish villages. Mary could tell by the stiff way Clara sat that she was angry with her.
She thought suddenly that the woman in the musquash coat had reminded her of Mrs. Ames. They were in the same company of the vicious, the loveless, the vindictive. She turned to Johnny, not to remind him, but because the memory had woken a warm impulse of gratitude and love.
His head was resting against the side of the car. His eyes glistened as if he had been crying with shame or impotent anger. She saw that what had happened this evening had been only one of many body blows aimed at his pride. He was equipped to meet them still but too many would do more than damage his self-respect; in the end, they could lead to the slow, painful breaking of his spirit.
The thought frightened her. She had not helped him—she had fought him with her sharp eyes and quick tongue, her cramped ideas and set beliefs, flinging at him the pots and pans—the kitchen furniture, she thought with disgust, of her mind. Now, ashamed, she wanted to give him something to make amends, give him something immediately, and there was only one practical thing that was close at hand. She must let him do what he wanted to do, she must stop opposing him. He must telephone Julian first thing in the morning.
Chapter Twelve
Two months later, Charles was lunching with his uncle, Joseph Fraenkel. They always lunched together on the same day every year, the anniversary of Charles’s mother’s death. It had once seemed to Charles a morbid, almost offensive ritual; now his uncle’s regular annual invitation only amused and touched him, as his uncle himself who had once embarrassed him by his thick voice and large, expressive nose, only touched and amused him now.
Joseph was a small man with a bald head and an almost tropically luxuriant growth of hair in each broad, flaring nostril. He had been modestly but comfortably off when Charles and his mother had gone to live with him before the war. Charles had been implacably incurious about what he did then. Now his uncle was very rich, a shipowner, and he had liver trouble.
Charles had told him that his appointment to the Law Fellowship of his old college had just been confirmed and Joseph drank to his nephew’s success in Vichy water.
‘Well,’ he said ruminatively, tucking his long, agile thumbs in the sides of his waistcoat, ‘It’s a marvellous world, isn’t it? Here we are.’ He paused, the stiff hair in his nostrils quivered as he tilted back in his chair and looked shrewdly at Charles as if daring him to deny this fact. ‘My father kept a fish and chip shop in Bromley. You wouldn’t remember it, though your mother brought you there when you were a little lad. He went bankrupt, poor old man, or I might have been there still. Now one of his grandsons is going to be a Cambridge Professor and the other is going to Eton next term. Next half they call it, so your Aunt Rose tells me. I leave that side of it to her, I just pay the bills.’ He stroked one side of his nose and looked down at his plate, the fish bones piled neatly on one side. ‘When I was a boy, I used to get tired of fish. There wasn’t anything else to eat. I used to lie in my bed above the shop, bathed in that terrible, hot, rich smell and feel my stomach contract. Sometimes I used to dream of the menus I’d looked at outside restaurants and wake up with my mouth watering. I’d think, when I was a rich man—how I would eat!’
He gazed at Charles with his mother’s eyes, plum dark and sad. ‘Now what do I get? Steamed fish and Vichy water.’
Charles laughed. ‘It’s the price you have to pay for social mobility,’ he said.
Joseph sighed. ‘Too high a price.’ He examined Charles critically. ‘You don’t look as if you’re ever likely to suffer in that way. You’re putting on weight.’
‘Contentment,’ said Charles, slightly piqued.
‘Brains,’ Joseph said, with pride. ‘Like my young Joe. All clever Jews get fat.’
Charles felt a momentary stirring of an old discomfort and was ashamed, not because he felt it now but because of the times when he had allowed it to affect the way he had behaved. When he was at Cambridge, his uncle had made him an allowance and he had spent part of every vacation in his uncle’s house in Maidenhead, lounging on their overstuffed arm-chairs, drinking his uncle’s whisky and gorging himself on his Aunt Rose’s good food. But he had never once asked them to visit him at Cambridge though he knew the omission had hurt them, for they were humbly affectionate people whose pride in their nephew had been as great as their pride in their own plump, bouncing little son. He said impulsively, ‘When I’m settled in—it won’t be until the autumn—you and Aunt Rose must come to Cambridge and visit me.’
Joseph smiled. ‘That would be nice. I’ve always wanted to see Cambridge. Though your Aunt Rose isn’t too fond of long car journeys now—or so she says. It’s age, you get stiff in the mind as well as the joints. Still, we’ll see.’
‘Good.’ Charles smiled back and thought: it’s too late, the moment always passes. It’s no good offering a meal to a man who was starving years ago. Joseph paid the bill and they left the restaurant, walking down the stairs to the bar on the ground floor. It was dark and crowded; Joseph was a regular here and he smiled and nodded at his friends, his hand on Charles’s arm. Blinking away the brightness of the restaurant, Charles picked out a short, plump man with a great many shining white teeth.
‘Ah—Kranz,’ Joseph said.
‘Mr. Fraenkel.’ He flashed his teeth. ‘May I introduce my friend, Mr. Cloutsham. Abba Ltd.’
Charles smiled formally at Julian, seated in the obscurity behind Kranz.
‘Ah—yes,’ Joseph said. His normally expansive friendliness seemed curiously shrivelled. He refused a drink, shook hands limply and gazed round him with a vague, abstracted air. He made no attempt to introduce Charles and the encounter was over in a minute. When they were outside, Joseph drew a deep breath. ‘Nice to get out in the air,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong with your friend Kranz? Does he pollute it?’
‘Ah—no.’ He looked at Charles cautiously. ‘He came to a friend of mine with a proposition he didn’t like. Something to do with a copper deal. Perhaps it was all right after all, but sometimes it’s as bad to be a fool as a knave and better not to mix with either.’ He grinned broadly and sweetly at Charles’s baffled, disinterested face. ‘It’s been fine to see you, Charlie boy. Your Aunt Rose was saying only the other day that it’s a long time since you came to see us. We’ve done a lot to the place, you’d hardly know it. There’s a hard tennis court now and your Auntie has a new three-piece suite in the lounge.’
‘I must come to see it. And you must come to Cambridge.’
‘We’ll see, we’ll see.…’ He pumped Charles’s hand heartily. Charles thought: he’s less of a hypocrite than I am, he knows I won’t come to Maidenhead
and that he won’t come to Cambridge and that it will almost certainly be another year before we meet again. And perhaps not even then.
He watched his uncle down the road with a kind of frozen sadness—a part of my blood, he thought, a part of my life, shed as easily as a snake sheds a skin.
He met the Protheros on his way to the tube station. They were walking quickly, Mary almost running on her high heels, as if they were late for an appointment. To Charles’s eyes, focused for the last hour on his little uncle, Johnny looked quite extraordinarily fair and Nordic. His hair gleamed in the winter sunshine, he wore a new-looking suit and a pearl-headed pin in his tie. He waved his beautifully rolled umbrella at Charles. They stopped, shook hands.
‘Charles, how are you?’ Johnny said. ‘It seems an age. And we were going to keep in touch.’ His smile had a warm compulsion in it.
‘I thought you were out of town. I rang once or twice.’
‘Damn. I am sorry. As a matter of fact I was commuting for a bit. There were a number of things to see to. Martin’s at prep school now, so it was easy just to close up the flat but we should have done something about the telephone.’
Mary said nothing, she only smiled. It was a brisk day and her cheeks were cold and flushed as apples above a sleekly new fur jacket. They both looked very prosperous and young, like the hero and heroine in a modern fable, Charles thought: the Jaguar, the foreign holiday, and the Football Pool win just around the corner. He felt distantly relieved. The last time he had seen them had been the evening Johnny had got drunk and though Charles had not thought this very important it had left a small, nagging worry at the edge of his consciousness, as small and unimportant as a light puff of cumulus on a summer’s day, or a healthy young man’s fear that the little stitch in the side may be cancer.
He glanced at Mary and felt a pleasant stir of pleasure. She stood very still and said very little while they talked but he had the impression of a restless, interior liveliness, a kind of held-in vitality—like a good child restrained by its elders. The thought amused him. She had attracted him that night, he recognized, more than any woman had done for a long time, though after he had gone home he had found that all he could clearly remember about her was the quick, stubborn lift of her chin and the prim way she had of pursing her mouth when thoughtful or disapproving. He had not intended to do anything about it. Charles had few scruples about women, his impulses were usually perfectly simple and basic, but he had one rule he always stuck to firmly: with married women you left it to them to make the first move, otherwise you gave them too good a reason for reproaches later. He had not expected Mary to make any move at all and in an odd way he was almost disappointed when she did. He would have laughed out of court any outright suggestion that he had a romantically idealized picture of how Johnny’s wife should behave, but in fact, though he had been delighted and flattered when she had telephoned and accepted his invitation to lunch, a queer, quixotic uneasiness had acted as a brake on his pleasure. So he had only been partially sorry when she rang him again, the day before their lunch, and said she couldn’t come. She told him her mother-in-law was ill; he had not believed her though he wasn’t hurt because she had lied to him. Dishonesty in women was something Charles had never blamed very seriously. Life was difficult for them; not only did it tie them to a disturbing physical rhythm but convention forced them more often than men into silly small deceits, petty stratagems. He took Mary’s excuse to mean that she had chosen to play the virtuous young matron and was half amused, half relieved. Now he gave her a quick, intimate smile to show that it hadn’t mattered, that all was well.
Johnny looked at his watch. For some reason, his obviously habitual gesture, the two fingers thrust into the waistcoat pocket, the slight narrowing of his eyes at the watch face, irritated Charles.
Johnny said, ‘I’m awfully sorry. But we really must go. We’re late already.’
Mary said, ‘We’re having lunch with Julian. There’s a man we have to meet and be nice to because he may be useful.’ Her eyes danced, she shrugged her shoulders and spread out her hands in a mock-European gesture. ‘A business gonnexion,’ she said in a guttural voice.
Charles found Johnny’s sudden warning frown more embarrassing than any blatant tactlessness, but he liked him for it.
They said good-bye; Charles was almost at the entrance to the tube station when Mary caught him up. She said breathlessly, ‘I meant to tell you—I was so sorry about our lunch.’
Her face was flushed with running; Charles saw Johnny waiting for her half-way down the street, looking in their direction.
‘I thought you’d ring again,’ she said. ‘Were you angry?’
‘Of course not.’ Her directness disarmed but also puzzled him. He wondered if it was an affectation and, if so, what it concealed. He said politely, ‘Is your mother-in-law better?’
He saw from the look in her eyes that she knew quite well why he had asked and was suddenly sorry he had. The deepening colour in her cheeks made him feel a brute. Then she said in a carefully neutral voice. ‘She died three weeks ago.’
‘I’m sorry, really sorry.’ He hesitated, hoping she would let him make amends. ‘May I give you a ring and ask you both to dinner one night?’ He laid a very slight stress on the ‘both’. ‘It’s only a glorified attic in Barnes, but I’m not at all a bad cook.’
She smiled willingly. He saw she would never bear malice. ‘That would be lovely. Do ring. I really must fly.’
She touched his hand for a second, lightly and impersonally. It was a gesture of forgiveness. Charles knew that however hard he tried, he could read nothing else into it. He thought, with a half guilty amusement, that he would have preferred to think of it as a kind of promise.
‘I don’t know why Johnny’s so late,’ Mary said. ‘He had some things to do at the office, but he promised he’d come straight here.’
She had said this, or something like it, at least five times in the last hour. It sounded almost like guilt: the thought came into Charles’s mind that perhaps she had known all along Johnny would not come yet, perhaps she had told him to come at eight o’clock, not seven. It was a common enough trick, part of the eternal female game of trying to seem virtuous when you are not. Charles wondered why it should suddenly strike him as such an unpleasant one.
He said abruptly, ‘It’s not like Johnny to be late.’
She looked up, startled. ‘No. He’s usually abnormally punctual.’ She gave a jumpy laugh and glanced round the room. ‘I like your attic in Barnes.’
‘It’s not exactly elegant. The furniture is all very utility—a bit gimcrack, I’m afraid.’
‘You’ve got so many books.’ (Go on, thought Charles ironically, say ‘They do furnish a room, don’t they?’) But she said, ‘It’s more comfortable than our flat. Not so much like an expensive antique shop.’
‘Some of your things are beautiful,’ he said, surprised.
‘I know. But all so old, so much older than I am and they’ll still be there when I’m dead. Sometimes I look round at that solid Queen Anne furniture and feel horribly impermanent. I like modern things better.’
Charles smiled, though she had spoken quite seriously, sitting neatly on the edge of the sofa by the fire, in a green wool dress very tight over the breasts but so simple, so almost severe in its cut, that the tightness suggested not deliberate provocativeness, but simply that she had grown plumper since she bought it. This idea amused him and made her seem somehow younger and more vulnerable than he had thought her. He decided that if she had engineered a chance for them to be alone together, it would be hypocritical to waste it.
He offered her another drink. She shook her head and he poured one for himself, re-arranged the bottles on a table near the sofa like a general marshalling his forces, and sat down beside her. Their thighs were close but not quite touching. He told her a long, rambling story about one of his students. It was not very funny but she laughed and relaxed in her corner of the sofa. Then he said carefull
y, ‘Mary I haven’t really told you, have I, how sorry I am about your mother-in-law?’
She smiled very slightly over her glass. ‘You mean, because you thought it was an excuse?’
‘That too, if you like.’ He felt he had to defend himself. ‘Women do do that sort of thing, after all.’ He smiled, a consciously man-of-the-world smile.
‘You would know about that, of course.’
Her voice had a sting that exactly answered his smile. It brought him up short and made him feel guilty as if he had been caught intentionally handing a child a bad penny.
‘I really am sorry,’ he said contritely. ‘Were you very fond of her?’
‘Yes. Very fond.’ She put down her drink and looked at him. ‘I didn’t really know how fond, until I knew she was dying. Then it was too late to tell her.’ Her face was carefully expressionless for a moment, then her lips shook; she looked down and away from him. ‘She was too far away. I had never seen anyone die before. I didn’t know they died so—so—privately.’
Her voice trailed off; her long hair had swung forward, parting at the nape of her neck. The skin there looked very white and soft, Charles found that he wanted to touch it, but only gently, to comfort her. Her very real uprush of grief had suddenly made her much more alive for him. For most of the time, he thought, people are illustrations, bundles of external characteristics—dark hair, white neck, green dress—only rarely are you aware of them as someone as real as yourself, as aware of them as you are of your own bones and blood. He wasn’t quite in love with her nor, at that moment, did he want to haul her into bed; he simply felt a kind of tender curiosity.
After a minute, she sat up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘what an exhibition!’ Her grey eyes were bright and damp, her skin faintly coloured with embarrassment. ‘You took me by surprise,’ she said.