by Nina Bawden
‘No,’ he said darkly, his mouth set. ‘All the wrong people. It just didn’t jell.’
They reached the corner. She hoped they would part there but he was tenacious. They had nothing to say to each other but he would cling to anyone rather than go home alone. We are alike in that, she thought, and was sorry for him. They went into one of the new coffee bars that had begun to spring up all over London. It was empty and fiendishly noisy, a juke box in the corner clicked down its sad, metallic discs and the blue-jeaned pansy behind the counter looked as if he had been waiting for the sixpences to run out before he shut up shop. He brought their coffee with an insolent waggle of his buttocks and they sat, side by side, on a bench behind a flimsy trellis trailing a plant of sickly leaved ivy. Sebastian talked. He was writing a novel, a symbolic novel with a new gimmick: it was to be written entirely in clichés. He made it sound dull and pretentious on a vast scale, a kind of stern, Homeric silliness. ‘Of course it won’t do well,’ he said. ‘Serious books never do. The pen is no longer mightier than the sword.’ He looked very young, his red hair standing up like a sweep’s brush above his sandy, unhandsome face. ‘Milton wouldn’t have a chance, were he living at this hour. He’d have to be a television personality to make any impression.’ He gave her what he supposed was a savage grin.
‘He’d probably be a wow on television,’ Mary murmured. The heat, the music, and his terrible, insistent voice had begun to take effect: she kept awake with an effort. ‘I must go,’ she said.
They had finished their coffee. He moved along the bench and pressed his thigh against hers. ‘Why don’t you come back with me? I daresay the bastards will have left a dribble of gin.’ She felt a distant echo of desire, a tired facsimile of reality. It would be easy, she thought, there would be the dregs of alcohol his guests had left behind, another cigarette and a few moments of fuddled sex on the ash-strewn carpet among the records and the tumbled piles of literary weeklies. But it wouldn’t work, she thought, it wouldn’t work. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I like my sex with roses.’
He gave a puzzled uneasy laugh. She said, partly to cover up, partly because she was sorry for his spoiled party, ‘It was true what I said about spending Saturday with my father. Only my son was taken ill. He nearly died. I was with him until late this afternoon.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, stricken. He moved his leg away hastily.
She said quickly, ‘Did Clara come?’
He pouted like a cross child. ‘She was late. And she only stayed a short time. That was what ruined the party, really.’
Mary smiled, stifling a yawn. ‘Clara was late because she was with me at the hospital. Anyway, you didn’t expect her to stay long, did you? She doesn’t like parties.’
‘Oh—I knew that. One asks her simply because one has drunk so much of her gin.’ He frowned sternly at the bowl of sugar on the table. ‘The point was, she’d promised to bring a friend of hers, a man called Charles Franks. He’s done some interesting stuff on international law—not that I give a damn about that, but I’d asked someone who wanted to meet him, the editor of my paper, actually. He only came because he wanted to meet Franks. But Clara whipped him away before anyone had a proper chance to talk to him. I must say, it was pretty thoughtless of her, though one sees her point. She’d have lost him if they’d stayed much longer. He exudes sexual attraction—so I’m told, anyway. Most of the girls this evening would have fallen flat on their backs if he’d so much as glanced in their direction.…’
His voice droned on. Mary felt ill and cold. Of course he slept with lots of women, perhaps even with Clara. She saw them together, Clara abandoned on the bed—a ludicrous image, Clara with her middle-aged face and leggy, young girl’s body. She drew in the details with a kind of savage greed, for the moment still rational, knowing that what she was doing was furtive and dirty, the frustrated woman’s private, lustful dream.
Then reason was done for and she sweated and shivered as if she had a fever. Jealousy is an old emotion and has its store of clichés; her stomach contracted, she wanted to hurl herself on the floor, to scream, weep, tear her hair. She crouched forward over the table and began to cry helplessly.
From a long way off Sebastian said, ‘I say, are you all right?’ His voice grated with irritation. When she did not answer he said quickly, ‘Look—hang on a minute. I’ll get you a taxi.’
Charles said, ‘Mary, are you all right?’ He spoke more sharply than he had meant to. He was cold, he had been waiting a long time, alternately cursing Clara for her neurotic fears and himself for being swayed by them. When the taxi stopped and Mary got out he had felt first a huge relief and then simple annoyance: of course she had done exactly what he had told Clara she would do. She had stood herself a good dinner and got quietly drunk, alone. She looked drunk: her hair was mussed-up, her face had a pale, shiny, liquor look and her eyes were darker than the shadows beyond them. They looked at him with blank alarm as if he were a stranger who had accosted her in the darkness.
He said more gently, ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you. The front door was open, so I waited in the hall.’
Her lips moved stiffly. ‘I thought you were with Clara.’
‘I was. She was worried sick about you. So was I.’ He felt a sharp flick of anger. ‘Whatever possessed you to go off like that?’
She shook her head slowly, saying nothing, staring at him with large, dark eyes as if she were looking at a disaster. He thought she was like a small, trapped animal, huddling against the opposite wall in her brown, fur coat. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said quickly. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’
She bent her head and lowered her lids so that he couldn’t see her eyes. Her look of utter exhaustion frightened him. ‘Have you got your key?’
She held out her bag, he took it, found the key, unlocked the door. The stairs down to the basement were dark as a mine shaft. He switched on the light, ran down the stairs and flicked down every switch he could find until the flat blazed with light. When he came back, she was standing where he had left her. ‘Come on,’ he said, hand under her elbow. He gave her a little tug and her eyes snapped wide open at him. ‘I’m coming in with you,’ he said. ‘I promised Clara I’d see you were all right.’
She made no protest and walked ahead of him, without stumbling, down the narrow stairs and into the drawing-room. It was like an old, stuffy hotel or a museum no one has bothered to visit for a long time. There was a smooth grey film over the polished furniture and a sour, sweet smell of dust, like stale cheese.
She stood in the middle of the room. Charles said, uneasy, but determined to go through with this, ‘I’ll make you some tea. Have you eaten?’
She made a small movement of her head that might have meant yes or no. He left her, a little uncertainly, and went into the kitchen. Here, it was untidy, almost dirty. The stove was stickily encrusted with coffee grounds, the sink piled with dirty dishes. There was milk and butter in the refrigerator but there seemed to be no other food. He toasted some stale bread, made tea.
When he carried the tray back into the drawing-room, she was sitting neatly on the sofa in the way she always sat, straight backed, hands folded, still as a statue. She had taken off her fur coat and he saw she was wearing a suit of dark grey flannel that made her look as if she had come out of an orphanage. He thought it looked as if she had been sleeping in it, and then it came to him on a flood of pity that she had probably barely slept at all. He put the tray down beside her and she gave him a scared, chilly smile. He poured out the tea. ‘Drink it up. Why did you take off your coat? It’s like a tomb in here. You’ll catch your death of cold.’
Her smile warmed up a little. She picked up the cup obediently and said quite easily, ‘You sound like an old woman.’
‘Never mind how I sound. Drink your tea.’
He turned to the grate. The fire was laid—paper and dry logs under a soft, black covering of soot. He lit it and the paper spurted blue flame. He was still busy with the fire when sh
e said, ‘I knew you were with Clara.’
He said absently, moving the logs delicately, ‘There was some stupid party she wanted to go to. You know Clara. Apparently she’d promised and she likes to fulfil her social obligations if she can. She ought to learn discrimination, though. That was a terrible party.’
‘Have you seen a lot of her?’
He turned round. Her face was white and her eyes had a question, or an appeal in them he couldn’t fathom. ‘We’ve seen each other from time to time.’ He hesitated. ‘She was the only person I could ask. I wanted to know how you were.’
‘Did you?’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘I thought you’d been making love to her.’
‘What?’ He stared at her.
‘Of course not. It was stupid of me.’ Her face unfroze suddenly and she began to cry, helplessly and miserably, not bothering to hide her face. For a moment he watched her, a confusion of impulses and emotions in his mind. Then he got up and went over to the sofa and took her hands. As soon as he touched her, she began to fight him, trying to twist her hands away, holding her head averted. He let go her hands and caught her shoulders. She pummelled his chest with clenched fists and when he only held her tighter, she jerked her head round sharply and refused to look at him. He laughed suddenly and shook her until she gasped; she shut her eyes and he twisted his fingers in her long hair until she opened them. They were bright and shining. ‘Oh, my sweet, darling Mary,’ he said, and kissed her neck.
Chapter Seventeen
Mary said, ‘I love you. But you must get up. It’s wicked to lie in bed on a Sunday morning. It’s nearly lunch-time.’
Charles said sleepily, ‘You’re a very wicked woman.’ He rolled over in the bed and watched her with pleasure, free for the moment from desire. She was standing naked by the window, one hand on the curtain, looking out at the sun streaming down into the area. With the other hand she scratched absentmindedly at the small of her back. ‘I’d be ashamed, if I were you,’ he said. ‘You think of nothing but your stomach.’
‘Do I?’
‘Certainly. For the last half-hour you’ve talked of nothing else but bacon and eggs and coffee. It’s disgraceful. The sin of gluttony. Besides, you’ll get fat.’
She dropped the curtain and lifted her arms above her head, fingers straight and pointed as if she were going to dive, turning and sucking in her stomach so that he could see the rise of her breasts and the rib cage curving down to the flat belly. ‘Have I got fat?’ She looked at him, half smiling, half serious.
‘Fatter than you were. Plumply rounded. A nice, plump, spring chicken. Anyone can see what’s happened to you.’ He grinned contentedly. ‘Satisfied women always put on weight.’
‘Conceited pig,’ she said dispassionately. She began to dress and he felt warmly domestic as she hooked, zipped and buttoned with complete absorption as if he wasn’t lying there, watching her. He thought that she could get dressed in less time than any woman he had ever known. He sighed loudly. ‘It’s a pity.’
She twitched her skirt straight and picked up a brush for her hair. ‘What is?’
‘To put your clothes on. Come here.’
She advanced warily to the edge of the bed and stood, calculatingly, out of reach. ‘Get up, lazy,’ she said. ‘You look indecent lying there. Showing off the hair on your chest.’
He lunged, surprising her, and caught her hand, dragging her down beside him. ‘Just for a minute,’ he promised. ‘Then you can go and cook bacon or polony or anything else your soul craves. I only want spiritual nourishment.’
‘Idiot.’ She lay still, her head hidden in the curve of his shoulder. A puff of wind blew the curtain and extended the area of sunlight on the floor. Somewhere outside a brass band was faintly playing a march. ‘It’s the right music for us,’ Charles said. ‘It has the right touch of nostalgia. When you were a little girl, did you ever listen to military music in the park?’
‘On Bank holidays. My father used to take me. We used to picnic on the grass.’
‘That’s what I meant. This is a picnic. A holiday. I wish it wasn’t.’
She lifted herself on one elbow, her hair fell down and tickled his face. She said, ‘We’ve been happy, haven’t we?’
He smiled at her serious face. ‘What do you think?’
She sighed, her breath warm on his skin. There were still two months, he thought, two months were endless; when you were happy, even two days could be an eternity. The brass band blared nearer and he remembered with an ache in his heart the sad end of every picnic, the empty ice-cream cartons, the empty bottles on the grass.
Suddenly, he felt the sharp whips of panic. He put his hands round her neck, his thumbs felt the pulse in her throat. ‘I want it to go on,’ he said roughly. ‘I want you to have my children.’
She did not move for a minute. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, her eyes soft and shining. Then she detached his hands gently from her throat and stood up. She smiled at him as she brushed her hair, but her withdrawal was more than physical and it hurt him.
He said, ‘All right. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not in your book of rules, is it?’
She said nothing.
‘You seem sometimes so complacent. It’s a kind of lower middle-class complacency. You know what’s right and what’s wrong, don’t you?’
She muttered, ‘No, I don’t.’ She put the brush down on the dressing-table and frowned down at it. ‘It’s just that there’s no point …’
‘Most women enjoy tormenting themselves,’ he said, deliberately forgetting that her restraint was one of the things that had astonished and delighted him from the beginning. He had expected the usual accompaniments to an affair with a married woman; the high-principled self-torture, the long self-justifications, the careful alignment of excuses served up, necessary as bread, with every meal. But she had never once used guilt as a weapon to modify their pleasure in each other and now, perversely, this made him suspicious and angry as if she had intentionally hidden a part of herself away from him.
He said, ‘Have you heard from Johnny?’
He watched her jealously, but she said quite simply, ‘Last week.’ She paused for a moment gazing thoughtfully at her reflection in the glass. ‘He didn’t say anything except that he was well and he hoped I was. It was like one of Martin’s school letters.’
‘I daresay that is a weekly duty that stamps out a prose style for life.’
She ignored the nervous irritation in his voice. ‘I’d never thought of that. But it must be difficult for him. He didn’t want me to visit him, you know.’
Charles thought she spoke as if they were discussing a common acquaintance they had not seen for a long time—it was precisely that kind of tone, thoughtful, but basically disinterested. He wondered if she had persuaded herself that there were degrees of infidelity and the worst was to talk your husband over with your lover. He realized suddenly that he had wanted to hear her say that she had been unhappy with Johnny, that one day she would leave him—if only to give himself the satisfaction of being angry with her. That was all it was—he wanted her to behave badly, so that he could behave well. For the moment, this discovery conquered his insecurity. She was right to hold on tight to the present, not to invite the future in, the guilt, the suspicion, like so many drab, unwelcome guests. He laughed and got out of bed. They stood, arms round each other. The sun shone warm on his back. She said, ‘I’m so happy. Is it as obvious as you said?’
He smiled down at her. ‘It was a joke, my baby.’
She leaned backwards against his clasped hands. ‘Clara knows, I think. Oh—she’s not said anything. It’s the way she behaves. She always telephones before she comes here—even if she’s close by, she telephones from the box on the corner. And when she does come, she’s nervous.’ She gave a low, warm giggle. ‘As if she expected someone to be hiding in the wardrobe.’
‘You’ve imagined it. She’s the most unsuspicious person in the world. She was here yesterday, wasn’t sh
e?’
‘She came to get some things for Martin. The schools close at the end of the week. She’s taking him to the sea.’
‘I thought she was going to do that later on?’ He hesitated. ‘When Johnny comes out. To make it easier in the beginning.’
She said quickly, ‘The weather’s so lovely just now.’
He thought her face was shadowed suddenly, and then that he must have imagined it because she closed her eyes and pressed against him, stroking his back, his buttocks, his thighs. He was excited but he wanted to tease her. ‘So you don’t want your breakfast after all? All right—ask nicely, like a good girl. Ask me to make love to you.’
She shook her head and hid her face, not coquettishly but with the queer shyness that had often surprised him when they made love. There was never any question but that she wanted it as badly as he did but she would never talk about it; he thought she was happiest when they made love silently, in the dark. He said, ‘Why won’t you ask me? Are you ashamed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? Come on—tell me.’ He held her away from him, hands hard on her shoulders, not teasing now. She didn’t try to hide or evade but looked at him with a serious, thoughtful expression like a conscientious student searching for the exact, right answer in an important examination. At last she said, ‘I love you. I don’t want you to think I love you because of sex—like a mouse having to eat cheese because it’s caught in a trap. If we could never make love again, I would love you all my life.’
The simplicity—the absurd simplicity—and the sweet, almost childish amplitude of her answer, touched a deep spring of sentiment in him. He looked at her, at the tiny imperfections on her face, the mole at the corner of her left eye, the tiny scar on her chin. It was like a revelation of tenderness. He said, ‘Sex isn’t always the end of love. That’s a romantic view. It can quite easily be the beginning.’