by Nina Bawden
She smiled and he held her hard against him to stop her trembling. She caught his hand as he began to undo the buttons of her blouse. ‘Charles—do other women—do they want this as much as I do? Am I different?’
‘Don’t you want to be?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know. I meant …’ He looked at her, surprised. Her eyes were serious and troubled. ‘I mean—am I normal?’
Laughter seized him, made him more helpless than pain. She watched him solemnly for a moment, then her face quivered, dissolved with laughter. They clung together, staggering, like children weakened by some marvellous joke. Charles thought he had never been so free from tension or worry or fear. ‘Oh my honey,’ he said. ‘Oh my lovely love.’
It was a good day. They went out to lunch and afterwards walked in the park. It was hot, but a breeze blew off the Serpentine when they stopped to watch the bathers. Charles felt very tranquil; he thought they had never been so close, so unreservedly happy as when they smiled at each other or when they half dozed on the grass and she touched his fingers gently to see if he was asleep.
When they got back to the flat, Mary went ahead to open the door and Charles stopped to pick up the pint of milk on the doorstep. The birds had pecked at the foil cap and the bottle was greasy with warm, dribbled milk. It slipped through his fingers and rolled off the step without breaking. ‘Damn,’ he said, and bent to pick it up.
Someone said, ‘Does Mr. Prothero live here?’
Charles straightened up and saw a tall young man with fair, almost white hair darkened slightly with brilliantine. He wore a new, expensive-looking suit, a white silk tie with musical instruments painted on it and a blue shirt, the same pale, clear blue as his eyes.
Charles said, ‘Yes, he does.’ He was distantly puzzled by the boy’s voice and appearance. It was difficult to imagine what he could want with Johnny. ‘He’s away at the moment,’ he said.
‘I know he’s been away. I reckoned he’d be back about now.’
Mary called, ‘Darling, what on earth are you doing?’ She was in the doorway, at the top of the steps. ‘Look at you.…’ Her voice was scolding, warm and domestic. ‘You’re getting milk all over your suit.’
The young man looked at her, then at Charles. The expression in his eyes was a curious blend of speculation and enmity. ‘Sorry to trouble you,’ he muttered, and turned on his heel.
‘What a mess. Look at your trousers!’ Mary took the milk from him with an exasperated clicking of her tongue. Her eyes shone with amusement at herself. ‘Who was that?’ she said.
‘I’ve no idea. He wanted Johnny.’
‘Oh.’
She turned her back and walked up the steps into the house, holding the bottle of milk carefully away from her full, green cotton skirt. Charles followed her. It struck him, briefly, that her ‘oh’had had a startled edge to it and he saw that the skin of her neck, above her white blouse collar, had turned a bright shade of scarlet. But he was in a happy, incurious mood. He was only disturbed for a minute.
Charles had to go to Cambridge on Monday to dine at High Table
and make various minor arrangements for the next term. He sent Mary a coloured picture postcard of his college and spent a great deal of time in a punt on the river, thinking about her.
Charles had always believed that however much people protested, they did, in the end, what they wanted. In his experience, this was especially true of women. He avoided the thought that Mary had not once protested, that she had never even pretended their love affair was unique. The memory of the last week-end they had spent together and the pleasant, leisurely freedom of his four days in Cambridge, combined to produce in him the comfortable sureness that the situation would work out eventually in the way he wanted it to. He no longer doubted what he wanted—every part of her held him now—nor did he doubt that she wanted it too.
She did not love Johnny. The only things that prevented her leaving him were his predicament and a few, distant but categorical rumbles from her puritan conscience. The first would resolve itself eventually, the family would see to that, and the second was only the hangover from a narrow upbringing. And he could change that: there was plenty of time.
He marshalled his weapons—all the time-worn arguments all lovers use—in all good faith: her marriage was a sham, to act as if it wasn’t would make her an escapist, a dodger. The sensible—the honest, thing, was to admit it and start again. It wouldn’t be so difficult. Johnny was civilized, legal details were a minor matter and easily arranged; the boy would have things explained to him as gently as possible. There would be some pain and bitterness at first, but it would soon be over.
Over the last five years, success had changed Charles from a determined, but unsure young man, into a determined and confident one. The change had been so gradual that he had barely noticed it. He lay in his anchored punt on the river, watching the brown water, and drifting in a world of sugar candy.
When he got back to the flat in Barnes, her letter was waiting for him. He read it three times before he understood it completely. Johnny’s sentence had been shortened and he was due to be released immediately. They would be going down to Fitchet for a while and then Lester wanted them to go abroad for a holiday.
‘… I know you will be angry with me for not telling you on Sunday. There is no excuse except the silly one that I couldn’t bear to.…’
That was the only personal reference, the only hint of emotion. There were no endearments. She said it was unlikely that they would meet again. Hope seized on this and then subsided. ‘Unlikely’ was colder than ‘never’and therefore more subtly final. She had weighed her words carefully, she wanted to leave no loophole. She had made her own rules and intended to stick to them. He supposed that they had included avoiding a heavy renunciation scene.
He thought: the bitch, the scheming, careful little bitch. And then: this is what the end feels like. Normally he had never minded when things came to an end. He liked to look forward and an end was usually a beginning. With the closing of other love affairs, there had sometimes been a certain struggle but always a certain relief. Now he felt no relief at all, only a sad, painful anger, a flimsy protection against emptiness. He screwed up the letter and threw it into the ashtray.
Chapter Eighteen
When Johnny came out of prison, Mary met him and drove him down to Fitchet. He spoke very little on the journey. She only remembered, afterwards, one remark that he made.
They had been to a pub for lunch and stopped for petrol about an hour later. When the tank was already filled, Mary discovered she had left her handbag behind in the pub. Johnny had paid for their drinks, he turned out his pockets now and could only produce two half-crowns and a few halfpennies. He explained to the garage proprietor, speaking with a new, terrible diffidence: it would never have occurred to him before that some people might play this game deliberately. The man glanced at him casually and said, ‘That’s all right, sir. Send me a cheque when you get home, will you?’
Johnny went white. He thanked the man, wrote down the address and said, as the car swung back onto the road, ‘Do I still look so obscenely honest, then?’
When they got to Fitchet, no one was there except the Swedish foreign help. Florence Prothero was with Clara and Martin in Cornwall. Mary said, ‘Lester thought it might be a good idea to give you a chance to breathe. He’s spending a couple of nights in town.’
He showed nothing, not even relief at Lester’s tact. They sat in the library, drinking gin, and he fell asleep in his chair. He made no objection when she woke him up and suggested he might like to go to bed. She took him up to the room he had always occupied as a boy. That had been Lester’s idea. Mary said nervously, ‘We thought you might like it. Say if you don’t.’
‘I do like it.’ He sat on the bed and looked at her with shy, bright eyes. ‘I’m sorry. It seems awful. You’ve been so kind. I’m ashamed.’
‘I’m not kind. And you don’t have to be ashamed because you want to be al
one.’ She remembered what Lester had said and repeated it. ‘You want to be alone for a bit. It’s the only way to recover.’
She left him to get into bed and came back with his supper on a tray. He smiled at her with transparent effort and said, ‘It’s good to be home.’
It came out quite naturally. It was a thing he deeply felt. But as soon as he had spoken he frowned, afraid he had been tactless. His home—their home—was in the basement flat in London. She wanted to reassure him that it didn’t matter but that seemed more cruel than pretending to be hurt. She made a mock-rueful face but he was too spent to do more than continue to smile apologetically.
‘Would you like me to go?’ she asked. He seemed to hesitate and she said, ‘Get one thing clear, will you? I want to do what you want most. I’m not going to be hurt.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Point taken.’ He smiled with a return of his old brightness. ‘Stay—if you don’t mind.’
She sat with him while he ate his supper. He asked her if she had heard from Julian.
‘Clara has. He writes to her.’ She paused, wondering whether to tell him this. ‘He sent her a cheque for me on a bank in Switzerland. For two hundred and fifty pounds. I’ve still got it—I didn’t know what to do with it.’
‘Does it matter? He owed me more than that, after all.’ He pushed the tray away and lay back on the pillows. ‘I expected that he would write to me.’
‘What? An apology?’
‘Not exactly.’ He looked at her, half puzzled by himself. ‘I can’t believe it was really his fault. I thought he would explain. Julian isn’t proud. When we were boys, if we quarrelled he was always the first to make it up.’ He turned his head away from her. ‘I can’t believe it. If I have to, it can’t be until I’ve seen him again.’
‘I don’t think you will. I can’t imagine, really, that you’d want to.’
‘He’s my friend,’ he said, as if this was the answer to everything.
‘Oh—don’t be so trite,’ she said, angry because his bewilderment was painful to her. She had guessed that he had not really blamed Julian, but she had not thought he could be so naive. She got up and walked restlessly about the room. The top of the bookcase held engraved silver cups and the walls were lined with photographs. Johnny, sitting with crossed arms in the Prefect’s rank, Frederick, plump and round-eyed as a little owl. Johnny and Julian in the First Fifteen. Young, immature faces as basic as a child’s first drawing. Innocence and goodness as fresh as spring and sentimental as an old tune. She said, ‘It’s hard when people let you down. Particularly if you love them. But you have to know that it happens. It needn’t make you bitter, but it isn’t sensible, not to acknowledge it. People aren’t gods, coming down in golden showers.’
‘I let you down,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing I hate. And it was just stupid, bloody pride. I couldn’t admit I’d been made a fool of.’
‘Don’t,’ she said quickly. She felt a livelier sense of shame than she had felt before and then, looking at him, a wild upsurge of hope. He was a brave man but in recent years his courage had been a force that slept: he had not learned how to adapt it to humdrum purposes. But he could learn now, perhaps adversity would teach him. His strength was of a kind that would show itself more clearly in a defeated position than in any other—the response of the back to the wall, the last stand. She sat down on the bed and took his hand.
‘The worst’s over now, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’ll take time to recover, but you’ve got time. Not only time, but so many other things. You mustn’t waste them. Everyone will help but you’ll have to do it yourself in the end. It won’t be easy but you can do it. With luck—just normal luck, you can build everything up again.’ She stopped. She thought that it had sounded like a sermon, long-rehearsed.
He said stiffly, ‘Thank you for being kind. But my life’s at a standstill.’
‘No. Listen.…’
His hand remained limply in hers but he turned his head away. ‘Don’t pity me.’
She knew that her presence humiliated him. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t pity you. I love you.’
His mouth almost smiled, there was an ironic glint in his eyes. ‘And you’ll make something of me yet, is that it?’
She saw how he had changed in the last months. His confidence was gone but his face was more sensitive, more wary—in an odd way, more human. She thought: no one is quite human until they’ve found in themselves a bit of the weakness and the shabbiness they have despised in other people. She felt she had discovered something important.
She said, ‘I don’t want to make something of you. But I think you’ve got a better chance now. You always expected too much of people, too much of yourself. Now you know most people are weak, that even you can be weak sometimes. Don’t you see, you ‘ve lost a handicap? Oh—I know I’m putting it badly.…’
He gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Mary, you’re a marvel. You’ve learned your homework nicely, haven’t you? Seven months in prison have matured me. I know I’m weak but so is the next man—we clasp hands in frail humanity. Thanks. I’d a thousand times rather believe the old thing—that you can’t touch pitch and not be defiled.’
She felt ashamed and miserable. All the things she had meant to say, the things she had worked out so carefully, seemed silly and childish. She said, trying not to cry with deep disappointment in herself, ‘You’re too fastidious.’
‘Can you be?’ He lay back against the pillows, his face suddenly very pale and bony. ‘Dear Mary,’ he said affectionately, ‘you’ve been wonderful. I mean it. But just now—I can’t take too much splendid, remorseless energy. I think it’s marvellous, it makes the world go round, but not everyone can pick themselves up and go on so easily.…’
He smiled at her, his eyes drifting as a child’s do when sleep is irresistible. She turned out all the lights but one and sat beside him while he went to sleep, in the dim room with its trophies, the oar above the bookcase, the team photographs, the miniature chest of drawers where Johnny kept his father’s and his grandfather’s war medals—the room that seemed suddenly like a shrine in memory of some golden, Edwardian afternoon. She was tired, her head ached, there was a sharp, metallic taste in her mouth and the walls of the room seemed actually to be moving inwards, dark and confining as a prison cell.
Except that Fitchet was emptier than it had been when he was a boy, Johnny must have found it almost unchanged. Lester stayed in his club during the week, the Swedish girl cooked the meals and two dailies came in from the village. He didn’t protest when Mary told him, nervously, that she would like to keep on her job. She commuted, getting up at six-thirty in the morning and getting back at eight in the evening. A week after Johnny came home, she was moved to a larger magazine in the same firm and given a job as editorial assistant. Johnny had shown no interest in what she was doing and she did not mention her small success to him, afraid that he might see it as a reproach.
She worried in case he was lonely, but he didn’t seem to be. He went to bed early, sleeping soundly as a boy, and got up late in the morning. He read the newspapers until lunch-time and then wandered round the house and garden looking for something to do. He spent two days helping the carpenter from the village cut out the worm-eaten wood from the rafters in the roof, dragging the rotten timber into a corner of the kitchen garden and making a bonfire of it. He borrowed the man’s tools while he was away at lunch and did a few jobs about the house which the carpenter said were as good as he could have done himself.
Once or twice he asked Mary when Martin was coming home, but it was as if he were inquiring after a cousin or a young nephew in whom his interest was friendly but peripheral. At first this hurt her and then she saw that a curtain had fallen: he was living at Fitchet much as he had always done, almost as if nothing had happened between the long school holidays and now. He didn’t miss Martin, he didn’t miss her when she was in London; a lot of the time he was alone, he said, he felt simply lethargic and went to sleep in his chair.
/>
He was asleep one Friday evening when Frederick telephoned. He had not seen Johnny since he came out of prison and Mary had only seen him once. She had told him then that Johnny wanted to see no one and he had understood too quickly; his hurt had shown in the way his forehead coloured, red weals above his sandy eyebrows.
‘Mary, I’ve got a young man here. Len Oakes.’ He spoke confidently as if the name should mean something to her.
‘Who is he?’
‘You don’t know?’ He sounded surprised. ‘A protégé of sorts. Johnny asked me to keep an eye on him, do something for him if I could. They were in prison together, for part of the time, anyway.’
The immediate image was unwelcome. ‘What does he want?’
‘To see Johnny. I wondered…’
‘No, Fred.’ She felt a rush of resentful hostility. Like many humble, undemanding men, Frederick thought nothing of making monstrous requests on behalf of other people. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said coldly, ‘but it’s out of the question. Do you think he wants to be reminded?’
He said diffidently, ‘The circumstances are exceptional. He’s an intelligent boy. Otherwise I wouldn’t suggest …’ His voice trailed away and then returned firmly, strengthened by dedicated conviction. ‘He has a lot of admiration for Johnny, it would help him if he could see him. He seems so anxious to. I’ve managed to get him a job, he’s a lorry driver, but his background is difficult. The important thing, you see, is to find someone, not a professional, to take a real interest…’
She said, ‘Don’t preach at me, Fred. I’m sure he needs help. But not from Johnny. Do you think, anyway, that Johnny would be the right kind of guide?’
That was incautious. He returned enthusiastically, ‘Oh, absolutely. The point with Oakes is that he’s proud. He’d take things from Johnny that he’d never take from someone who’d no idea—who’d never been in the same fix. D’you see?’ He gave a disarming ripple of laughter. ‘It might do Johnny good, too.’