by Nina Bawden
‘Helping others we help ourselves,’ she said. ‘That’s on the poster outside the local Methodist church. Thought for the Week.’ She wondered why she always had to tease Frederick. Was it shame? Or envy?
He said levelly, ‘Sometimes it’s true, Mary. Johnny took a great interest in the boy. He wrote to me about him twice.’
She felt a queer twinge of apprehension. ‘No, Fred,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s quite impossible.’
Len Oakes turned up on Sunday morning after breakfast. Lester had gone to play golf. Mary saw him from the window of her room and recognized him at once, a slender, beautiful boy with hair like a white silk cap. He wasn’t wearing his expensive suit but his bush shirt looked new and his jeans fitted him like skin. He walked slowly up the drive, hands thrust deep into his front pockets, blue, hostile eyes scanning the windows of the house. She moved back, out of sight, and saw Johnny come out of the door and go up to him. They strolled across the lawn, Johnny’s hand on the boy’s shoulder. Once Oakes glanced backwards at the house, laughing. From where Mary stood, he looked like a schoolboy who was good at games and at a peak of health; his body was slender but robust. After a little, Johnny left him and ran back into the house. It was the first time Mary had seen him run for months. Left alone, the boy walked along the drive, kicking a stone and whistling.
Johnny’s face was bright, his eyes alerted with excitement. He was not in the least constrained; as he told her about Oakes, his voice betrayed only an unexpected joy. Mary was nervous, not just on her own behalf but on Johnny’s. She remembered the boy’s face when he had looked at her, outside her flat, his insolent beauty, his cool, hard gaze. She could not believe that Johnny could help him in the way Frederick intended: she thought he had looked like someone who is activated only by the simplest kind of self-interest.
Johnny talked of him with an odd kind of pride, almost, she thought, as if there was a kind of glamour in Oakes’s history. He had been born, in Brixton, to a tobacconist’s daughter, nine months after a night out with an unknown, celebrating seaman. Mother and son had lived together in an atmosphere that was a curious blend of poverty and shiftless luxury. Oakes had told Johnny that he had never tasted margarine even during the war, or the cheaper cuts of meat. He had never been to school but he had been taught boxing and judo and at one time he and his mother had studied yoga together. She had also taught him to steal purses out of women’s shopping baskets when he was still in his perambulator.
What emerged in the space of ten minutes, was an unpleasant picture of a combination of physical strength and soft-mindedness. Mary could not understand how Johnny had been taken in, as he clearly was. He radiated sympathy, and all the time he talked his eyes were serious and fascinated.
She said, ‘What does he want? Does he think you have money?’
He frowned. ‘Does that matter? He’s got good stuff in him—I’d like to think I could give him a hand.’ He stopped and added slowly, ‘In a way, you see, I owe it to him. There is so much more excuse for him than there is for me.’
She thought: it’s not like that at all. He’s been used, all his life, to the idea that his friends will admire him, look up to him. Only this sort of boy could admire him now. She felt sorry for him and a deep, undefined fear. She said, ‘What do you think you can do?’
‘I don’t know yet. I shall have to see. He seems to trust me. He’s got a job because I suggested it—I sent him to Fred, did I tell you? I thought he’d know the form. It’s the first job he’s ever had. But he needs backing up—you see, his mother says he’s a fool to work. Perhaps I can’t do anything. At least I can take him out to lunch. We’ll go to the pub.’
‘What shall I say to Lester?’
He grinned, glowing with well-being. ‘Tell him Oakes is an old school friend.’
‘Now we’ve got the chance,’ Lester said. ‘I’d like to have a word with you about Johnny.’ They had been walking in the garden and he had spoken suddenly, sighting a blackbird along his walking stick.
‘Yes?’ She felt reluctant. She did not dislike Lester any more and was grateful for his kindness, but she no longer had much confidence in his judgement. She had once thought of him as a buccaneer; now this description seemed to present too rumbustious, too turbulent a picture, a false hint of romantic readiness. Lester was a steady man, she had decided, whose steady achievement was of a rather low-grade kind and entirely bought: without money or background he might have been a reliable foreman or a trusted mechanic. It irritated her that he did not seem to comprehend his limitations. He was still quite sure that he lived at the warm, comfortable centre of the world.
‘I’ve been thinking about Johnny for a long time.…’ He mumbled on but she barely listened until he said, ‘I’ve not been fair to him. Jealousy is a dreadful thing.’
She heard him with astonishment. He had astonished himself, his small eyes were desperately shy. He burst out explosively, ‘Father loved him so,’ and then fell silent, swishing at some nettles growing at the side of a flower bed.
Mary said uncomfortably, ‘I know that.’
‘Yes, of course you do.’ He stared at her vaguely. ‘My mother was a large, dull woman with big feet.’
She half smiled and then saw he had not meant to be funny: he had spoken with chilly, vicious precision. ‘Father married her because the family fortunes were down the drain. Her father made office furniture. She bored him. I bored him because I was her son. My son bored him because he looked like her. He hated the fact that he was condemned to live with a lot of oafish bores.’ He leaned on his stick and said heavily, ‘It’s a handicap, to know your father despises you. I always got bad reports at school and I couldn’t run.’
He spoke simply, a fat, elderly man, stripped suddenly naked by the memory of bad reports and slowness at games. He said, ‘I’m not trying to excuse myself. Just explaining the situation, don’t y’know?’
She nodded, moved almost to tears by the simplicity and completeness of what he had said. He went on swishing at the nettles.
‘Father envied other men their sons. Johnny was what he always wanted—he made him, like God, in his own image. I suppose I hated him. Johnny, I mean. Ridiculous, to hate a boy, but he was so … so damned … beautiful. Light and strong. I used to watch my father watching him and see the lust in his eyes.’
He glanced at Mary, saw the shock in her face and said quickly, ‘Oh—not physical, he just loved beauty. D’you know, my wife took me to Greece on our honeymoon and I couldn’t stand it. All those bloody statues. It wasn’t just their bodies, but the other things they stood for.’ His voice rose and he made a clumsy, groping movement with his hand as if to drag words out of the air. ‘All those virtues. Good, honest, brave. He got his ribbons—Lord, how the old man crowed.’ He turned to Mary, his face beaded with sweat. ‘D’you know something? When Johnny got caught out, I loved him. For not being so damn perfect after all.’
He stood trembling, at a pitch of intensity she would have thought inconceivable a few short minutes before. Then, visibly, he changed. He became abysmally embarrassed. His eyes glanced off her with dazed unhappiness and he tried a short laugh. ‘I’m most damnably sorry,’ he said. ‘That was a disgraceful exhibition. Do me a favour, forget it, will you?’
She tried to reassure him, gabbling excitedly. She thought: dammit—to use his phrase—for the first time she really liked him. But his inherited reactions were too firmly set. Intimate revelations were shameful, she could have talked till doomsday and not convinced him that she was neither embarrassed nor horrified. He took her arm, gripping it above the elbow, so anxious to leave the scene of his humiliation that they were almost running by the time they reached the house.
He released her arm in the library and poured brandy for them both in enormous goblets. It restored him. He had passed through two stages, the cathartic outburst and the appalled embarrassment. Now he became the brisk, practical man. He tucked his thumbs into his waistcoat and fired out sentences in sharp
, military bursts. He had been thinking. He wanted Mary’s opinion. Before the war, Johnny had wanted to be an engineer. Did she know? Just a boy’s phase, of course. Always messing about with cars and tractor engines. Even spent some of his holidays helping at the garage in the village. Of course his grandfather would never have considered it. Engineering wasn’t a suitable profession. But things were different now. He’d been talking to a man he knew who was in oil. They wanted representatives in Australia and New Guinea. Not salesmen, men with technical qualifications who could check on the installations and mix socially. There was a shortened two-year course for recruits at one of the northern universities and then an assignment. Johnny was a bit over the age limit but that could be fixed. Prospects were good. What did she think?
His eyes, wandering nervously round the room, came to rest on her with shy inquiry. ‘I haven’t said anything to Johnny. I don’t want him to think I’m pushing him around.’
‘No.’ She was surprised and confused. ‘How settled is it?’
‘Johnny’s only got to say the word. I once did this chap a good turn.’
‘Does he know about Johnny?’
‘Yes. It won’t go any further.’ He stood up, clearly uneasy, and glanced towards the window as if invisible and disturbing things were taking place outside.
‘It’s awfully kind of you.’
‘Forget it,’ he said with rough impatience. He was completely in control of himself again, secure behind the fortress of his high, polished forehead, his shameful feelings stuffed away like soiled linen, out of the public eye. She had preferred him when he had been pitiable and inadequate in the garden—perhaps everyone loves failure, she thought suddenly. You can’t love success, you can only fear or envy it: she had felt she could love Lester when he showed her his weakness as he had said he loved Johnny now. Thinking like that made her ashamed. She said, ‘I don’t want to forget it, Lester. Should one forget kindness?’
His embarrassment revived. He glowered and stroked his chin. He didn’t answer her question but said abruptly, ‘Will you talk to him? He’ll listen to you.’
‘Yes, if you like.’
She was aware of a growing, inner excitement. It might work—a completely new life, a blank page. Lester went to his study to write letters, he said, but actually to snooze. She passed by the window a little later and saw him, snoring cosily in his chair, a copy of the latest military memoirs open on his knee.
Later that afternoon, the August sky darkened, rain blew from the sea. The storm was rattling the windows when Johnny came back. She was lighting a small, summer fire in the drawing-room and he came in quietly and closed the door. She thought he looked at her warily and felt a tightening in her throat.
She said, ‘Hallo. Are you wet?’
‘No. I took the car.’
‘It’s coming down cats and dogs.’
‘Yes. It was pretty sudden.’
He came slowly towards her. Mary said, ‘These logs are hellishly damp.’ She prodded them with her foot and they spluttered green and blue.
‘That’s not the way.’ He crouched on his haunches with the tongs, balancing the logs expertly. When he straightened up he looked subdued and a little tired. He yawned slightly, lit a cigarette. The room was dark and she looked at his face in the uncertain firelight. The lines didn’t show, only the fine bones and the queer, arched shape of his eyes.
She said, ‘Did you have a good lunch?’
‘Not bad.’
There was a silence. She said, ‘I think I must have seen Oakes before. He came to the flat one Sunday, looking for you.’
‘He told me.’
She understood from the disdainful expression on his face exactly what Oakes had said. ‘What did he say?’
‘Does it matter? I daresay he’s a liar, as well as everything else.’
She had a sudden, hysterical desire to dispense with this stilted skirmishing. ‘He was telling the truth. I was with a man. I suppose he drew the obvious conclusion. That was true as well.’
There was another silence. Then he said, ‘I wish he hadn’t told me. It was none of his business.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘Nor of mine, either.’
It was a magnanimous attitude, she thought, but one that might be difficult to hold for too long, like an unnatural pose for an old-fashioned photographer.
She said, ‘It is your business. Going to prison doesn’t deprive you of the right to be angry if your wife lets you down.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said, and added with awful honesty, ‘I meant it was none of my business because I’ve been such a failure to you sexually.’
It sounded very queer. She said, ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ It struck her, bleakly, that it was funny that they should be so eagerly arguing each other’s cause. Almost funny, anyway. The thought that drained the humour from the situation was that selfless detachment can so often cover up a coldness in the heart. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Or shouldn’t matter. That side of things is luck. There’s no escape clause in the contract.’
He smiled at her out of a vast apathy. Then he said, slowly, ‘I’ve no right to ask you—believe me—I mean that, but was it just a chance thing? Or are you in love with someone?’ That ‘someone’, instead of ‘someone else’, tolled his acceptance of defeat.
‘I was.’
‘Are you still?’
‘I suppose so.’ A cold self-loathing twisted inside her. ‘But it’s over now.’
He turned, resting his arm on the overmantel and his head on his arm, staring into the fire. After a while, he said, ‘It doesn’t have to be.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘Is he a gentleman?’
The colossal absurdity of the question shocked her. It was as if they were moving, not in the real world, but among the jerky heroics of some old silent film. She laughed hysterically, her hand to her mouth.
He whipped round to face her, his eyes glittering with anger. ‘I meant—would he marry you?’
She saw her chance, spread out and shining like the cities of the plain. Other women left their husbands and married other men and paid no penalty for it. Why should she be so squeamish? Not to do what you wanted could be virtue, it could also be a kind of masochistic pride. Johnny would divorce her if she wished, in fact he would certainly insist that she divorced him. It would be done discreetly, with as much decency as possible. Then she saw that there wasn’t really a choice. She thought: there seldom is, there is just the thing you can do and the thing you can’t do.
He said, ‘No one would blame you.’
‘I’m five years too old to think that matters.’
He said bitterly, ‘I wouldn’t blame you.’
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘No.’
‘Then I want to stay.’
He sat on the floor beside her chair. She put out a tentative hand and touched the side of his face.
‘I ought to hate you,’ he said. ‘I ought to be jealous. I should want to hit you, to drag you round the floor by your hair.’ He turned to look at her with a face like stone. ‘Isn’t that how a lover should feel?’
‘Don’t.’
‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it how your lover will feel if you go to bed with another man?’
She said, in agony, ‘It isn’t the important thing. It comes to an end. Sex doesn’t last.…’
‘But love does,’ he finished ironically. ‘Would you buy me off as cheaply as that? What does it mean?’ His eyes narrowed, hard as amber. ‘I learned something this afternoon. That boy … Oakes … is in love with me.’ The blood had drained from his cheeks. He said in a steady voice, ‘I feel so disgusted that I would like to die.’
Mary thought: Oh God, couldn’t they have spared him this? She said, ‘How did you know? Did you guess—or did he tell you?’
‘Oh—it wasn’t too openly offensive. He wasn’t soliciting. It was just that he seemed to expect…’ He broke off, his eyes searching her face. ‘Have you ever thought there might be something wr
ong with me?’
‘Of course there’s nothing wrong with you,’ she said, and knew that whatever the truth was, it was impossible to say anything else. He was so utterly innocent: if a thing was unthinkable, he would never think it. For so much of his life he had aroused so much love that he had never realized love had so many different faces. His friendships sprang from a long and good tradition of trust and loyalty and out of a deep, sweet sentimentality, incorruptible in its simplicity. But she saw that he was corrupted now with the final corruption of knowledge. His face betrayed his thought: how often has this happened before, how many other relationships have been dirtied in this way? It was as if he had suddenly been brought face to face with carnage, like a general looking back on a massacre.
She said, ‘It’s not wrong to love your friends.’
He said painfully, ‘It’s not all. I suppose I’m a fool to be shocked. A blind, stupid fool. When I was in prison he—Len—was friendly with another man.’ His colour darkened but he still looked at her. ‘I was jealous.’
She thought she had never in all her life felt so useless. ‘It’s just one thing, isn’t it? It’s not all. Can’t—can’t the whole of life be different from the parts of it?’
‘I can’t accept that. You can’t just forget a thing.’
He couldn’t, of course. One blot on the page cancelled out a thousand credits. ‘I’m ashamed,’ he said.
‘Don’t be. Please don’t be.’ She said desperately, ‘Listen—no one is perfect. Why should you expect to be? Isn’t it just a kind of pride? You can’t expect to go through life—untarnished—like a knight in some stupid old story.’
He glanced at her from the gold corners of his eyes. ‘I can’t lie to myself and call it honour.’
He spoke quietly and flatly but his face was livelier. If he could say something like that, she thought with a flash of amusement, the worst patch was over. She could think of nothing now except to tell him what Lester had suggested. She was nervous at first but grew more assured as her natural hopefulness asserted itself; she began to recover the feeling that life was still expanding, holding out unseen promises that could easily be bright. He listened to her without any vital awakening of excitement, but with enough interest to make the prospect viable.