“I see,” she said, still holding the plate of cooling steamed plaice. “You want me to marry you to be a comfort in your old age.”
“Don’t mock me. I say things all wrong, I know. Haven’t had much practice. Even Jane had to propose to me. But you know what I mean—you and I—it could be worse. We get on fine, we laugh at the same things, enjoy the same things. We wouldn’t get in each other’s way. You know what I’m like; you wouldn’t expect me to be too connubial. You’ve always said you’d like to live abroad. We could do that.”
“Italy?”
“If you like. We could scrape up some money there somehow. I might even get on with my book.”
“I doubt it.” She paused, and they studied each other’s faces for a moment. “I don’t believe you really mean any of this, Dan,” she said, skirting decision. “It’s only because you’ve been ill and had premonitions of senility, and because you like my son.”
“Don’t you want him to have a father?” Daniel asked. “God knows he needs one. He’s terribly spoiled.”
“He’s not!”
“You said yourself you thought he was.” “That’s different.”
“He’d be pleased, anyway, if we got married, even if no one else was. Your mother would be furious.” He laughed, enjoying that thought.
“Yes, she would.” Her mother would distrust Daniel because he did not hunt, or even ride. For a long time she had had a square, prosperous fruit farmer lined up for Valerie, who dreaded going to visit her mother, because the fruit farmer would call and they would be left alone in rooms together.
“Dan, I don’t know,” she said. “It might be right. It does seem the answer to a lot of things, but—I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem awful to be discussing marriage dispassionately like this? Like a couple of French mothers arranging a. manage de convenance”
For that was what it would be if she married Daniel, and with her single experience she could not imagine what a marriage without love would be like. It was difficult enough sometimes with it Without, what should make two people stick together?
“Dan,” she said. “You see, I …” She wanted to say: “I don’t love you”; but if he felt the same, and had discounted that, it would be silly to bring it up. She did not think he was at all in love with her, but you never knew. Look at Mr. Piggott. She had lived with him for six months without knowing. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Thanks for the offer.” They smiled at each other like very old friends with a lot of unspoken things understood.
Pip bounced in and said: “Hullo, you two. How’s the romance getting along?” and she left them.
That afternoon she rode on a bus to Oxford Street to buy Philip a new blazer. She had needed to get away from the flat, away from the concentrated atmosphere of sickness and inaction and her own indecision. She had to be alone before she could think straight. Being an only child, she had never understood how anyone thought at all about anything in one of those big family houses where no one ever shuts a door, and each borrows the other’s clothes, and there is always a wireless or a gramophone or a child practising some instrument, and always an argument at meals.
It was difficult to think, because she was so tired, but she had got to think wisely. Easy when you were a girl to make your decisions. Either you were in love or you were not. But when you had been married and did not expect to be in love again your decision was complicated by reason. She must do the right thing, because this was probably her last chance. She would never like anyone as much as Daniel.
You could not pray for guidance on top of a 73 bus, with a fat woman trying to oust you off the seat with a black mackintosh shopping bag. If it had been summer she would have gone into the park and let thoughts come to her, which was her experience of the answer to prayer. As it was winter and very cold, she went into Lyons Corner House, which was warm and bright and full of unknown, disinterested people. You could even sit at the same table with them and be alone. It was not done to talk in Lyons. If you only asked for the salt, it might be taken as a liberty. You stretched out a hand and took it for yourself. That was not rude.
Valerie found a place at a table for four and asked for tea. It was only just after three, but already tea was in order. Lunch began before twelve; tea followed hot on its heels, and by half-past five people would be eating roast joint, vegetables and suet roll. Valerie knew. She had not lived in London on a small income for ten years without knowing and cherishing Lyons as the one single institution whose loss would probably mean more to the city than anything else. Let the Houses of Parliament be bombed, St. Paul’s gutted by fire, even Buckingham Palace razed to the ground and the lawns and lakes no more than a seed bed for fireweed, if you could get a cup of tea and a toasted snack at Lyons the end of the world had not come after all.
It was raining outside, and the light was already beginning to go out of the day, but in here the lights were ablaze, mackintoshes steamed, girls peeled scarves from their heads and shook out their hair, and the band was playing “Voices of Spring”. At Valerie’s table were a young, speechless couple and a worn-out, potato-faced woman who looked as if she had always got up too soon after having her babies. She had cocoa and rolls and butter. The young couple, in a hideous embarrassment which prevented their enjoyment of the food, since they could not talk about it, had tea, baked beans on toast, and trifle with a golf ball of ice-cream. Valerie had tea and biscuits.
The others at the table took no notice of her. She was just a woman in a brown coat and a beret put on at rather a smart angle, having tea and digestive biscuits. She sat and enjoyed the warmth and heard the music with the back of her brain while the front part tried to sort out whether she was disloyal to Philip, whether it was wrong to marry someone you did not love, and why, in fact, she was toying with the idea of marriage at all. Suddenly looking over her cup between one sip and the next, the answer came to her like one of those revelations you get under gas at the dentist, when you think you have discovered the secrets of the universe, and, coming round, with the galloping in your ears slowing like a run-down machine and the voice of the dentist booming, insistent, you struggle to tell him, but he, the fool, only says: “Spit here, please.”
This time, however, she did not think she understood; she knew, and it did not escape her, as the gas dreams do with returning consciousness. Often before in Lyons she had marvelled at the shy, ill-matched couples and wondered idly how, but not why, they came to choose each other and cling. Now she saw clearly what was between the ugly young man with the catcus forehead and nicotiny forefinger, and the plain girl with hair like a loofah, who had had all her teeth drawn before she was thirty and replaced with long new ones that gave her trouble in eating. Inarticulate, unattractive, they were heading for a life where the girl would become like the beaten woman with the cocoa and rolls and the young man would grow slovenly and a little pompous perhaps with the facile philosophy of the workshop, go collarless and stubbled on a Sunday and be drawn home after work not so much by the thought of his wife and children as by a good hot meal.
They were going to be married. The girl had a small stone on her left hand, and they had too little to say to be only mildly courting. Product of crowded families who only spoke their minds when quarrelling, they wanted each other because they had never before come first with anyone. They mattered to each other, if not by emotion, then by the circumstances of betrothal and marriage. They were not in love. There was no spark between them at all. Valerie, who had been in love, could tell that. When the boy, reaching for the pepper, touched the girl’s hand, neither of them noticed it. They needed each other more for comfort than passion. They had found, as they grew forlornly up, that human beings are not strong enough to carry their lives alone, and that neither families nor friends nor even doting mothers can give the secret, saving support that comes only from the mysterious relationship of marriage.
The woman with the cocoa and rolls knew that, she said: “My old man may give me trouble, but I wouldn’t
change him,” that was what she meant.
The trifle and ice were finished and the plates scraped. “Well, what’s it to be,” the young man asked the girl. “Dottie Lamour or Bette Davis?”
“I don’t mind, Ron,” she said. “Let’s see which is the shortest queue.”
“Miss!” He snapped his fingers unsuccessfully. He flushed as the waitress turned her back. The girl looked away. She was used to their being embarrassed by waitresses. It did not matter. When they were married they would go home together and be themselves and no one to see. No waitresses to belittle. No women in smart brown berets to stare and criticise. Valerie, realising how she had been staring, pulled out of her thoughts and also tried to call the waitress.
“It always seems as if they deliberately don’t look.” She smiled at the couple opposite. “Like programme girls.”
“That’s right,” the young man mumbled, not looking at her. The girl turned with the air of being a little deaf, making finicky, chewing movements with her mouth. When they got outside, she would ask: “What she say?”
“I dunno. Something about the Nippies. I don’t know,” and they would go off together, secure, two people who had each other, independent of Valerie, not needing her or anyone else. In the cinema they would cling, not so much from a sex urge as from their fundamental need to cling.
All the time while she was buying Philip’s blazer, queueing for the bus, fighting on to it and hanging on the strap, Valerie was warming with tides of relief. The hard-won independence that she had thought she would have to keep all her life—she could let it go. She was not breaking faith with Philip, because this would not be the same. You could marry and be happy without being in love. She needed someone of her own; so did Daniel. It was as simple as that. She smiled in the faces of the people who hung and swayed and read folded bits of the evening paper and tried not to be pushed farther along the bus.
Going in at the front door, she thought that she must go and see Mr. Piggott and be nice to him. Oh, the relief it would be not to have paying guests; the relief of not being responsible for earning your living!
She went in to Daniel first. He was lying moodily with his knees drawn up. “You’ve been a bloody long time,” he said. “I’ve had no tea.”
“I’ve been getting Pip’s blazer,” she said. “He had to have another. The old one was simply bursting at the seams and———”
“All right, all right,” he said, turning his face to the wall. “Spare me the domestic details. Get us some tea, there’s a good girl.”
Valerie went to the kitchen. Now was not the moment, but it would keep. The young man with the prickly forehead and the girl with the false teeth had probably waited years before they came to their understanding. She could wait, too.
When Daniel was better and Mr. Piggott was better, and Philip had gone back to school—taking his temperature unsuccessfully for a week beforehand—Daniel took Valerie out to celebrate.
“I haven’t worn an evening dress for ages,” she had said one day when she had been looking through her clothes. “Come to think of it, I haven’t been out in the evening for ages.”
“You shall go tonight,” said Daniel, grabbed the telephone and bullied the Savoy into keeping him a table.
At the Savoy there were girls who reminded Valerie of herself many years ago. Harmless, amiable girls, conscientiously vivacious to dull men who were paying. Girls who thought this was all of life until they were one day shocked into love and found that this was a part of life you did not need to have. There was a woman friend of Valerie’s who said about Daniel in a meaning way, for everyone was always trying to remarry her: “My dear, who is that man?”
Daniel heard, and they laughed quite a lot about that, keeping the joke going, thinking themselves funnier than they were, for they had a lot to drink. Afterwards they went on to a night club and had quite a lot more to drink and Daniel kept telling Valerie she was beautiful. Although he said it in a rather remote, technical way as if he were painting her, she was pleased. There was no room on the floor to do more than dance in a shifting dream. Valerie, leaning against Daniel, half asleep on her feet in an uncaring haze, imagined that if they were married this was how she would feel about him. When one is rather drunk one cannot imagine what it will feel like to be sober. WTien one is quite sober, one can remember the emotions of drink; well enough at least to drink oneself back into them if necessary.
Then they went home together. Of course, she remembered in the taxi, this was why she was going to marry him, so as to be able to go home with your head on somebody’s chest, instead of propped upright on a corner of the taxi, with yawns flooding your eyes and stiffening your jaw, warding off middle-aged men, or making bright conversation to people you hoped you need never see again.
“I think,” Daniel said, and she could feel it in his chest as he said it, “you’d better marry me, Val.”
“All right,” she agreed. They said no more until they were home. Daniel was asleep. Valerie was not even thinking. She was not going to have to think for herself any more.
As he pat his key in the lock, Daniel said: “If Mr. Piggott is waiting up with cocoa, I’ll slay him.” But Mr. Piggott had gone to bed hours ago, leaving a note on the hall table. “Cocoa in saucepan in kitchen. Mrs. Pegg phoned. No message. Will phone you at the office.” Mrs. Pegg was a persistent woman who called Daniel Danny Boy, because she said that she had Irish blood.
“That’s one person you can cut out of your life from now on,” Valerie said. She stood in the drawing-room by the embers of the fire that Mr. Piggott had optimistically made up to be burning for their return, and waited for Daniel to come to her.
When he kissed her, she stood stock still and the world went cold and dead. She was suddenly in despair for Philip.
“Dan!” She pushed him away and looked at him in horror. “What’s happened?”
“I don’t know.” They were sober. “It’s all right, darling.” He kissed her again, but her lips and body were frozen. He dropped his arms, and she began to cry, carelessly, like a child, without putting up her hands, not thinking how she looked.
The next day, Daniel said that he was going to find somewhere else to live. “If I stay here,” he said, “I’ll only start thinking we ought to get married next time I get ill or tight.”
“Yes,” Valerie said. “I suppose you’d better go.”
“One day, perhaps when we’re—what was that Noel Coward line?—‘When we’re old and tired and the colour has gone out of everything a bit,’ I might come back.”
“Yes, Dan. Come back one day.”
When he had gone, Valerie began to look for another paying guest. She could not be in the flat alone with Mr. Piggott. He had said to her, the day that Daniel had left: “I say, don’t think it cheek, but I do wish you’d call me Alec.”
Chapter Seven
George
“Ah Well,” said George, making no move to get up from the café table, “this won’t buy the baby new clothes.”
“Not if she likes mink, it won’t,” said Uncle, who was always one for a joke at any hour of the night. He never seemed to sleep, didn’t Uncle. Couldn’t afford to with the trade he had, for the Dew Drop Inn was just a nice distance from London for the first cup of tea on the way north, or the last coming south, to keep you going till you had clocked in with the lorry and gone home to breakfast.
“What time you due in then, George?” he asked, catching onto his underlip with his long black front teeth as he reached up to fill the urn from a gallon jug.
“Eightish.”
“You’ve got a hope in that old crate,” said Fred, sopping a bit of hard pastry in his tea. “Better get going, mate.”
“Yes, I did,” agreed George. He sat a moment longer to prove he had a will of his own, then got up and went to the counter to pay, yawning and scratching his chest as if he had just got out of bed, which was where he felt he would like to be.
“Better not sleep on the job t
onight, son. Might wake up dead,” Uncle said, raking in the coppers. “See where it says about the Tatto Slayer?” He swivelled the evening paper across the counter, stabbing at a column with his cigarette finger, which was like a stump of charred stick.
George read: “Austin Clay Maverick, who was questioned by the police in connection with the headless, limbless torso tattooed with the words ‘Happy Easter’, which was left in a basket outside the back door of the Home Secretary’s house, has since disappeared. He is believed to have been seen in a café in the Hatfield district. Maverick is thirty-five, thin, medium height, with black hair, brown skin and very white teeth. ‘Like fangs’ said Mrs. Nora Stringfellow, the proprietress of the café, who served a man answering his description with tea and Swiss roll.”
“Coming out this way, you see,” Uncle said. “I got me bullet-proof waistcoat on.” He slapped his chest, then pretended to double up in a fit of coughing, which was one of his favourite jokes.
“Fangs, eh?” George murmured, finishing the column. The things they had in the papers nowadays! It was like reading about another world, where things happened to people all the time. Nothing ever happened to George in his world.
“Ta-ta, Fred. Good night, Nob. ‘Night, Bill.” He called out to people he knew as he left the shack. When you had been doing the Great North Road as long as George, there was always someone you knew at all the stops.
“Ruddy awful night,” answered Bill Nix, who was picking his teeth by the door. “Inverness, for crying out loud. Mean driving half through Sunday. Good Friday, they call this. Muckin’ Bad Friday to me.” He screwed up the side of his nose in a tremendous sniff.
George had started up his lorry and was a good quarter of a mile away from the Dew Drop before he realised that his face was still set in a disapproving expression to match his thoughts. He had not liked Bill making that crack about Good Friday. It wasn’t right. That was one of the things that got him about Edie, that she laughed at him about going to church. She wouldn’t go herself or make the kids go to Sunday-school, and with George away so much the little blighters hadn’t got a chance. One day he’d chuck this lark and start in being a good father to his kids.
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