by Nina Bawden
‘I’m sorry. We’re always apologizing to each other, aren’t we?’ Now he could see her face, Charles found it easy to touch her. He put his hand on her knee. She sat up a little straighter but she made no attempt to push his hand away. She smiled at him, not simply invitingly, but broadly and fully as if she had just recognized a friend.
Then the telephone rang. Charles got up too quickly, spilling his drink.
‘Give me your handkerchief,’ Mary said. He pulled it out of his top pocket and chucked it at her as he went to the telephone in the tiny hall.
It was Johnny. ‘Charles? Look—I’m terribly sorry. I’m still at the office. Hang on a minute.’ His voice blurred a little as if he were shutting a door or moving into a different position. Then it came back, clearly but softly. It was a wretched nuisance but there was something he simply had to clear up. Would Charles please forgive him and would they start dinner without him? He would come along afterwards of course, as soon as he possibly could.
The apology would have been fulsome enough coming from anyone else, but it lacked, Charles thought, the almost comically concentrated energy Johnny would usually pour into an explanation of this kind. He had sounded distant, casual almost—almost as if there was something really wrong. Charles could hardly believe this possible. For him, Johnny still inhabited a defended, sunny world in which nothing could ever go badly wrong, but the idea disturbed him and roused all his affection for Johnny. He came back into the room, looked at Mary on her knees beside the sofa mopping up the spilled gin, and thought with relief that at least Johnny had telephoned in time to stop him making a fool of himself. He said, when she sat back on her heels and looked at him questioningly, ‘Johnny can’t get here till later. There’s something he has to finish at the office.’
‘That’s not like him.’
He looked at her coolly, deliberately making himself half angry with her. ‘What do you mean?’
She looked surprised at his tone, frowning as she pushed the hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Only that he doesn’t usually take his job so seriously.’
She got to her feet lightly and easily. All her movements, Charles had noticed, were quick and neat. He itched to put his arm round her waist and feel her breast in the cup of his hand.
She held out his soaked handkerchief and said practically, ‘You’d better put it somewhere, otherwise the room will simply reek of gin.’
He took it from her, being careful not to touch her hand.
It was a long time since Charles had felt any real confusion between principle and inclination as far as women were concerned. His encounters, during the last few years, had been either professionally tutorial or briefly and casually sexual. The women he went to bed with were nice, jolly, carnal girls—or rather, he liked to think of them like that. The times he was honest with himself he recognized that he was simply jealous of the time any other kind of relationship would take up. Time was precious to him, and peace of mind. If this sometimes seemed, in those honest moments, a rather niggardly attitude, he could remind himself that the long, intimate revelations he had listened to in his student days as an expected prelude to a simple pleasure, had afflicted him even then with a dreadful, suffocating boredom: they had not only been time-wasting but so alike and always quivering with the same obvious suppressions.
Putting the finishing touches to his meal in the tiny kitchen, he was surprised and faintly annoyed to find that he could still be as absurdly jumpy as a very young man alone for the first time with a pretty girl. He had a rather uncomfortable feeling that part of his excitement was directly attributable to the fact that she was Johnny’s wife. With a solemn resolve that he knew he would find ridiculous tomorrow, he determined that until Johnny arrived, he would be careful to keep the conversation on a strictly impersonal level.
She seemed quite ready to take the cue from him. Their brief moment of closeness before Johnny’s telephone call might never have happened. As they talked, the heave in his blood died down and he began to feel a straightforward pleasure in her company. Her mind was quick but untrained and this pleased him. He believed, in a not quite contemptuous way, that higher education cramped rather than expanded the feminine mind—certainly clever women, he had discovered, tended to be more plagiaristic than men.
He said something of this after they had finished eating and had settled by the fire with coffee. She burst out laughing, light, mocking crinkles at the corners of her eyes. ‘How very pompous and masculine,’ she said. ‘Keep’em barefoot and pregnant—is that what you’d like to do?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, a shade stiffly.
‘But you do think like that. Most men do, underneath. Even Johnny does …’
The crinkles left the corners of her eyes and the laughter went out of her face suddenly, as if a blind had been pulled down.
‘Is there something wrong, do you think?’
‘He said he had something to finish. It just sounded as if he were busy.’
She looked at him thoughtfully, pursing her lips as if she didn’t think this much of an answer.
Charles said, ‘I’m not really sure what he’s doing.’
‘I thought you knew. It’s a firm called Abba Ltd. Importers and exporters. I’m not sure exactly what they import—mostly rather queer things it sounds like. Straw baskets from Yugoslavia, that sort of thing. Didn’t he ask your advice about it?’
‘I don’t think I was much help.’ He realized that he hadn’t really tried to be. He said defensively, ‘One always has a rooted objection to giving any kind of professional advice to one’s friends. It can so often turn out to be wrong.’
‘Oh—of course.’ She looked at him apologetically and he felt ashamed.
‘What is Johnny’s part of the business, exactly?’
‘He’s in charge of the forwarding department, for one thing.’ The laughter crept back into her face. ‘I expect what he does is more difficult than it sounds but it doesn’t sound very difficult. As far as I can see he mostly sits in the office and makes telephone calls. Or takes people out to lunch. Julian has a lot of what he calls contacts.’
‘Do you know a man called Kranz?’ Charles asked suddenly.
She looked surprised. ‘Yes—as a matter of fact we had lunch with him the day we met you. A long and expensive lunch. He’s a nice little man. A bit stupid, but nice. Why did you ask?’
‘I’d heard his name somewhere in this sort of connection.’ He thought it might do no harm, one day when he had time, to ask his uncle what he had meant about Kranz.
Mary said, ‘He’s a shipsbroker.’
‘Is he? I thought he was something to do with copper.’
She shrugged her shoulders, her face suddenly lit with amusement. ‘I’ve no idea. Business people are all so terribly mysterious, aren’t they?’
He wondered what she meant. ‘It’s a different world. How does Johnny fit into it? Somehow I don’t see him at dull business lunches. Or selling straw baskets from Yugoslavia.’
‘There are other things.’ She looked at the cigarette she had just lighted and threw it into the fire. ‘Johnny thinks he’s a failure,’ she said.
‘Does he?’
This moved him sharply. He stood up and paced slowly across the room. ‘He’s not really a failure, you know. It’s just that he flew up too high, too young.’ His didactic tone was both hardy and lyrical.
Mary said earnestly, ‘I think I see what you mean.’
He smiled. ‘You sound just like one of my students.’
‘But I do see. It’s something you could say of a lot of men. So many went to war like Johnny, straight from school. Wouldn’t you say that for most of them, peace was bound to be an anti-climax?’
‘Only for a few. For most of us the war was just an uncomfortable episode—a disruption. But for Johnny—perhaps you’re right, it was a kind of fulfilment. He embraced war like a great, heroic dream. And in a way it was just that, you see, the last chance there’ll
be for anyone to stand out, alone. When they dropped the atom bomb they put an end to individual acts of bravery. Now any coward can press a button.’
He thought for a moment with a deep, frowning concentration and then spoke rapidly, on a wave of deep, emotional conviction. ‘I think of Johnny in a great silver plane, flying up near the sun and looking down on the world, being able to see how it looked and how much of it mattered.’ He glanced at her and added with embarrassed crispness, ‘An absurdly romantic view.’
‘It is a bit. You have to come in to land sometime.’
She was half laughing—with shyness, probably, but it stabbed him. He said sharply, ‘You need different qualities on the ground. Like the tenacity of a weed. Better ones, simpler ones, if you like, can only exist in opposition to something, pain or disaster. When things are soft and dull they atrophy.’
She said, ‘Things are always bound to be easier for fat buccaneers like Johnny’s uncle.’
‘Yes. For little fat men and dull people on the make and sly intellectuals like me.’ He smiled at her, no longer serious.
She looked at him for a moment and then said, ‘I really ought to go home. It’s late.’
He was quite unprepared for the disappointment that seized him. ‘Must you? What about Johnny?’
‘I don’t think he’ll come now.’
‘How will you get home?’
‘On the tube. Johnny has the car.’
This exchange was suddenly uneasy. She stood up, he fetched her coat and preceded her down the echoing stairs to the dim hall. He opened the heavy door with its panels of gloomy, Victorian glass. She held out her hand but he said quickly, ‘I’ll come with you.’
He followed her down the steps, bare-headed, without a coat.
She said, ‘You’ll be much too cold.’
He sensed her reluctance but shook his head. ‘It’s quicker across the common but you’d lose your way alone.’
It was very cold, their breath curled white and the ground spiked like splinters of glass. On the common, the country seemed to have made a ghostly entry into London: the pearl-white lights of the nearest road seemed no more than a piece of fanciful theatre, throwing up a backdrop of trees, every still branch defined and flat as a Japanese painting. The cold, after the warm room, keyed up all his susceptibilities: something seemed to be coming to a climax.
They walked in silence. The path went through trees, then the trees ended and there were scrubby bushes and the diffuse, pale light of the tube station a couple of hundred yards away. Charles stopped and took her hand, feeling a kind of unformulated urgency.
She looked at him with mild surprise that had a touch of wariness lingering behind it. He took hold of her and kissed her. She felt very small in his arms and her face was frosty. For a moment she didn’t move, though she didn’t rebuff him either. Then she said something he didn’t catch and pressed her body hard against him. He kissed her open mouth and felt her nipple stiffen in the palm of his hand. He felt a tight, almost painful excitement but at the very edge of his mind was a corner of calculation, a little, ice-cold pin man looking on and congratulating him and reckoning up the times of his lectures, the times he was free.…
Suddenly, without warning, her clenched fists thrust against his chest. He let her go and she bent to pick up her handbag. He bent too, their heads collided.
He stood up, laughing and rubbing his forehead. ‘Now—will you have lunch with me?’
She shook her head.
‘Don’t be silly.’ He was still laughing.
She shook her head again, saying nothing, her lower lip caught between her teeth.
‘Why not? Or do you think tea would be better? I’m free tomorrow after half-past three.’ He caught her exultantly by the shoulders but she twisted away from him saying, ‘No,’ almost sullenly and started to walk away from him towards the station. She walked quickly and decisively as if she had a long way to go and might as well start now.
He watched her, astonished. Then he ran after her and caught her arm. He said roughly, ‘For heaven’s sake, girl, don’t pretend.’
His body was solid with excitement and a kind of pleasureable anger. The calculating little pin man was entirely gone. He was as innocently ready for love as a young man alone in the street after dark. He felt the small bones of her arm under her fur jacket and looked at her face as if he had never seen it before. ‘You want to,’ he said urgently, anxious to make a plain thing plain to her beyond a shadow of doubt. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have kissed me like that.’
‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said.
He stared at her. So that was the line, was it? Do what you want to—it doesn’t matter so long as you make yourself feel good and guilty afterwards, then you can have it both ways. The sneer flickered along the edge of his mind and died out. She hadn’t been coquetting or acting the faithful little wife. She had, quite simply, been speaking the truth. He felt both shocked and exhilarated as if he had just run naked into the sea.
Chapter Thirteen
Johnny was in the drawing-room, asleep in his chair. Limply asleep, his hands abandoned by his sides. When Mary called him he woke up slowly and blinked.
‘You’re late,’ he said, speaking fuzzily as if his mouth was full of cotton wool. He yawned, widening his eyes and rubbing the corners. ‘Damn—I’m sorry, I forgot. I should have come along and joined you. But it was late and I was so damn tired.’
He stretched lengthily in his chair, his eyes resting on her with sudden curiosity. Then he stood up slowly, still looking at her and said in a voice she had never heard him use before, ‘You look like a girl who has just spent a cosy evening in bed.’
The pulse jumped in her throat, but he said immediately, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.’ He looked surprised and contrite. ‘It was just that you looked so comfortable.’
She laughed, expecting him to laugh too. He did smile briefly, like a man politely acknowledging someone else’s unfunny joke, and then looked bleak. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t bring Charles back with you. There are one or two things I wanted to ask him.’
‘Why couldn’t you come?’ she said. ‘What kept you at the office?’
‘Nothing much.’ He gave her a quick look and went past her, into the kitchen. She followed him. He was standing by the table looking tired and harassed. She said, ‘Is anything the matter?’
‘I’m afraid there may be. I’m sorry, I can’t think very clearly. My head aches.’
‘Would you like a drink? An Aspirin?’
He shook his head and sat down in a kitchen chair, staring at the wall, as if he didn’t really see it. It occurred to her that he was luxuriating in a sense of grievance because he had been working late and she had been enjoying herself. Then she remembered that this was quite unlike him. She said, ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘A man came to see me,’ he said slowly.
‘A man?’
‘A Customs Officer. A man called Coker. Apparently we’ve been contravening regulations. It seems we sent a parcel of copper to Poland. I’ve been turning the office upside down looking for the file but I can’t find it.’
It hardly seemed serious, a crime on the level with smuggling an extra bottle of brandy or exceeding the speed limit. Mary said, ‘Is that all?’
‘It’s illegal.’
‘I gathered that.’
‘I mean it’s important,’ he said impatiently. ‘Look—it’s frightfully boring, but if you really want to know …’ He looked at her questioningly and went on, ‘Sometime—the beginning of this year, I think, the government lifted the controls on the export of strategic materials to the Commonwealth. But you’re still not allowed to send anything of that kind behind the Iron Curtain. You can go to jail for that sort of thing, y’know.’ He gave her a rueful half-smile.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said. ‘You know that’s ridiculous. Besides, it isn’t anything to do with you, is it? You told me your job was just to have lunch with r
ich wholesalers and sell them jolly wooden toys.’
‘It’s not quite true—though it’s probably about all I’m good for. I suppose I simply didn’t want to bore you.’
‘I wouldn’t have been bored,’ she said.
‘Perhaps not. But it is boring.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway—I applied to the Board of Trade for an export licence. I understood the copper was going to Karachi. It seemed all right—Julian had a contact in a firm of merchants there. Normally I would have rung up the P & O and arranged to have the stuff on the docks. But Julian said he’d deal with it. He was going to arrange something with Kranz. This man Coker says a vessel was chartered, that the stuff went to Antwerp and then on by rail to Poland.’ He looked at her hesitantly. ‘But I can’t check on what he says until I can find the file. The only things I could find were letters about bank guarantees.’
‘I don’t really understand. Except that it’s Julian’s business, isn’t it? What does he say?’
He didn’t look at her. ‘Julian’s in Rotterdam. He’s due back in a couple of days. I sent him a telegram—I hoped he’d telephone this evening, but he didn’t. I tried to telephone him but he wasn’t at his hotel. I’ve booked a call for nine-thirty tomorrow morning.’
‘Do you think he’ll be able to clear it up?’
‘Oh—certainly.’ He spoke rather too emphatically. ‘There’s probably some terribly simple answer I just haven’t thought of.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Julian usually has an answer to most things.’
She smiled. ‘You mean that what’s happened isn’t likely to be absolutely dishonest? Simply a small, technical fiddle?’
‘Something like that.’ He smiled back at her. ‘I’ll have that drink now, if you don’t mind. I’ll make you a whisky sour.’
She went into the drawing-room and fetched the whisky. As she passed by him to get the ice and lemon out of the refrigerator, he caught her hand and held it to his chest. It was the sort of gesture she had seen portrayed in line drawings in Victorian three-decker novels, never in real life. She felt, as she had so often felt on sentimental occasions, that she ought to have been touched instead of merely feeling awkward, standing there with one hand imprisoned and the other clutching the whisky bottle.