by MARY HOCKING
‘I’ll go and see it.’ Kerren was stiff with embarrassment.
Adam said drily, ‘It’s nice to make someone happy.’
‘I don’t want to be ungrateful . . .’
‘And I don’t want gratitude. Let me know if it works out sometime.’
He rang off and Kerren went back to the work bench where she stuck several pages of War and Peace into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Abercrombie Terrace was a turning off the Bayswater Road. The houses were mellow brick, late Georgian; there were lilacs in the garden of number six and a magnolia against the wall of the house opposite. As Kerren went up the steps she knew how Aaron felt when he was given a glimpse of the promised land only to be told that he could not enter it. God was cruel; but Marjorie Neilson turned out to be reassuring in one respect. Her appearance immediately disposed of any idea that she was being kind; kindness was a quality with which she was not acquainted and she had got along very nicely without it. She was a small, middle-aged woman with a firm, rounded figure. Her clothes were discreet but so absolutely right that in her presence other women would look as though they had tried too hard. Her face had the same kind of unostentatious assurance. The tobacco-coloured hair was cut very short so that its flicked edge continued the line of the cheekbone; she had a boldly curved cheekbone and the pale amber eyes were bold too. The eyes flicked over Kerren making a frank assessment. The reaction was equally frank; a faint arch of the eyebrows and a smile that saluted the ability of life to throw up a surprise every now and again. Kerren had an idea that she was thinking of Adam at that moment.
‘How nice of you to come! Is the library sensible about extended lunch hours?’ Her voice was as crisp as leaves in autumn, and in its lower register there was a hint of the mellow fruitfulness. As they went up the stairs she said, ‘It’s a case of closing the top floor or letting it. And if you close a floor I always feel the house loses heat.’ Kerren had been placed in her proper perspective.
The top floor was not Kerren’s idea of an attic. Admittedly the windows were smaller and the ceilings lower but there was plenty of light and space. ‘This was the servants’ quarter in the days when such beings existed.’ Mrs. Neilson dismissed servants as an historical fact without any of Mrs. Norman’s regret: Mrs. Neilson lived in the present. The main room stretched the length of the house. It was adequately carpeted in hard-wearing corded green and the walls were painted white. The furniture was old but good; it had obviously found its way upstairs as new furniture had been provided in the rooms below. There was a kidney-shaped settee in worn gold velvet, a tub chair in faded green and gold tapestry and a low divan bed against the wall. At one end of the room there was a sink, gas stove and small folding table.
‘You can have a dividing curtain if you like; but I don’t want the room to be partitioned,’ Mrs. Neilson said. Kerren guessed that a partition would be too permanent a feature of her occupation.
‘It would cut down the light,’ she pointed out.
‘Yes, it would,’ Mrs. Neilson acknowledged. She seemed surprised that Kerren should make such a positive contribution. As a reward for enterprise, she conceded, ‘You can make what you like of the room provided the alterations aren’t structural.’ She looked at Kerren meditatively, making a minor reassessment. ‘Put up some pictures if you want to. I hate this fad for bare walls. Life has been Spartan enough of late, God knows!’
The pronouncement dropped so casually came to Kerren like a small revelation. Life had been Spartan; she had not realized it because she had grown up in that atmosphere, but now she saw that it was so. Moreover, the remark implied that the time had come to do something about it. But not at this moment. Mrs. Neilson was proceeding briskly with her tour.
‘The bathroom is across the landing. You don’t bath in the middle of night, do you?’
‘No.’
The lavatory chain had broken and a red silk cord with a tasselled end had been attached to the cistern. Kerren stifled a nervous desire to giggle. Mrs. Neilson said:
‘Well, you’ve seen it all. Do you want to wander round on your own for a bit, or would you like to come down and have a drink?’
‘I think I should be getting back,’ Kerren lied. Mrs. Neilson made her feel nervous and she knew from experience that drink and nervousness were a fatal combination; she could visualize herself in Mrs. Neilson’s lounge, pealing with laughter while she indulged in some of her more extravagant Irish reminiscences. The episode would no doubt be repeated for Adam’s entertainment, Kerren could almost hear her saying, ‘That funny little goblin that you sent to me produced the most amazing performance on one glass of sherry.’ Kerren followed Mrs. Neilson down to the hall, glowering as though the remark had in fact been made.
‘How do you feel about it?’ Mrs. Neilson asked pleasantly enough. ‘Or would you like time to think it over?’
‘It’s very nice.’ The unavoidable moment had come. Kerren said gruffly, ‘How much are you asking for rent?’ It was like trying to word a difficult statement in a foreign language.
Mrs. Neilson had picked up a letter from the door mat and was studying the envelope. She said absently:
‘How much are you paying at present?’
‘Fifteen shillings, but the accommodation isn’t comparable. I can afford more than that . . .’
Mrs. Neilson turned the envelope over and studied the back of it. ‘We’ll make it fifteen shillings then.’ She sighed and put the letter down on the hall table, an expression of rueful exasperation on her face.
‘I’m afraid I’m not a very convivial person,’ Mrs. Neilson seemed to be talking to the letter as much as to Kerren. ‘We probably shan’t see much of each other. But if there’s anything you want you must rout me out.’
Kerren promised that she would do this, although she could think of nothing less likely than that she should rout out Mrs. Neilson.
Kerren moved in on the following evening. She could hardly believe her good fortune; she tried not to sleep at night so that she could savour every precious moment of it, the occasional footfalls in the street which emphasized rather than disturbed the peace, the dim light of the street lamps and the blessed darkness when they went out, the sound of the wind rustling the leaves of the lilacs. She felt that she had turned a corner.
The trouble with turning corners was that one was immediately confronted with a new situation demanding new decisions. The most immediate problem was Adam. For some reason she could not write to thank him. Usually she enjoyed letter-writing, but on this occasion her efforts were either unbelievably stilted or self¬consciously clever. This was distressing. He was the one person with whom she had felt very much at ease in the navy. But in those days she had imagined that he belonged completely to the service world, that island isolated from the mainstream of life. He had lost his two children when the City of Benares was torpedoed and his wife had committed suicide; his private life had been obliterated and the door of the past was irrevocably closed. Or so it had seemed to her. But now she began to realize that this was too drastic a judgement. In the war years, she had had her initiation into the adult world: for Adam, the war years had been an interruption of the pattern of adult life and when the war was over he had taken up what threads remained. He might be lonely, he might have lost the desire for personal relationships, but he still knew his place in the complex of civilian life, he knew the rules of the maze. This was made abundantly clear to Kerren in the person of Marjorie Neilson. It was Marjorie Neilson who prevented her from writing to Adam. She must mention the woman, since she was Adam’s friend and had kindly provided this delightful room; but each time she came to the woman, she could not pick on the right phrase. ‘She seems nice’; but Mrs. Neilson would detest the word nice. ‘She seems interesting’; but interesting suggested a desire to get to know her better. Whenever she came to the part of the letter where she referred to the woman Kerren had a vision of Adam and Marjorie Neilson reading the letter together. How well did he know he
r? And were all his friends like her, suave, well-adjusted, and above all capable, people who accepted the world around them and made it their business to survive in it, people who had reached an accommodation with life? Undoubtedly they were: Adam himself was concerned with publishing books that would sell. He and his friends moved not in the shadowy area inhabited by Miss Nimmo, Cudd and Ian, but on a brightly lit stage where one had to know the moves and the cues and where it was important to say the right lines at the right time. Most important of all, one had to know the part one was playing.
How could she write to Adam? The Adam she had known did not exist any more. Perhaps he had been her creation; if so it was beyond her to recreate him in the different circumstances of civilian life. They had been particularly sympathetic to each other in the service days. He was an iconoclast at heart and had not slotted easily into the service machine; she had been the person with whom he could most easily make contact. But now he had returned to his own kind of life, to people with whom he had a more mature understanding. And that was that. These things happened and one had to accept them. It would be ridiculous to make a fuss, to over-emphasize the importance of what was after all a very small disappointment. Nevertheless, acceptance proved surprisingly difficult. She had taken her special relationship with Adam for granted and like most things taken for granted its value was not realized until it was threatened. For a time she became quite unbalanced in her attitude to him; she was even jealous of Marjorie Neilson. When the telephone rang she would find an excuse to go to the bathroom so that she could pause on the landing, imagining that she might hear Mrs. Neilson talking to him. Once, when she heard the front gate open late at night, she got out of bed and went to the window. It was bright moonlight and no shadow moved in the garden or in the street. Was he already in the house? She actually contemplated going down the stairs to listen and was only deterred because the treads squeaked. In the morning she was disgusted by her behaviour and saw herself on the brink of obsession. She made up her mind to put Adam out of her thoughts, it was plain that they did not belong in the same world.
She indulged in a bustle of activity. Jan had now gone into partnership with the monkey-faced man who was called Jacob. She offered to act as waitress on three evenings a week and they accepted gladly. She had a free meal on these evenings as well as her wages, so her financial circumstances began to improve. She celebrated by buying two Van Gogh prints which appealed to her as a violent affirmation of life.
Cath and Dilys were invited to supper to view the room. She told them that she had heard of it through someone at the library and they accepted this. Cath, who was now preaching the importance of self-denial, frowned on this move in the direction of luxury.
‘Things have been Spartan for too long,’ Kerren told her. ‘It’s time we concentrated on the good things of life.’
Dilys applauded this sentiment and contributed two gay cushions for the divan. It transpired that she knew Marjorie Neilson slightly, but to Kerren’s relief she showed no desire to meet her.
‘She’s so piercingly sane, don’t you think?’
Kerren thought this a wonderful description of Marjorie Neilson. She repeated it when she wrote to Robin. She also told Robin about her encounter with Adam. ‘He seems just the same, but I realize now that he is very much a man of the world. I doubt if we have much in common.’ Jan had given her a letter for Robin; she enclosed it with some misgivings, but comforted herself with the thought that Robin had always played safe.
She felt in some ways that she was doing the same thing herself. Ian had asked her out and they had been to another French film. She found that she no longer derived quite the same satisfaction from his company; she suspected that he would always promise more than he could ever fulfil. She was beginning to want fulfilment of some kind.
It was about this time, when she was feeling the need for success in some sphere or other rather badly, that the librarian asked to see her. The librarian inhabited a room at the top of the library which was approached by a spiral staircase; looking down one could see arcs of shelves falling away below. It was like a spider’s web in one of the more macabre fairy castles. Mr. Phillimore, the librarian, was an almost legendary character who only appeared among his staff on committee days when he would swoop down demanding intensive last-minute research into agenda items. He looked on these occasions like Rip Van Winkle wakened from his long sleep and confused by the strange world around him. Mr. Phillimore had never reconciled himself to the need for committee meetings. Miss Nimmo was surprised when Kerren was summoned to his presence three days after the last committee meeting: it usually took Mr. Phillimore at least a week to recover from the shock of his monthly exposure. Kerren, however, accepted it calmly as part of a pattern at last unfolding. She knew that there was a vacancy on the administrative staff and by the time she had reached the last turn of the stair, she was convinced that it was about to be offered to her. She saw herself years hence, married to a distinguished man (whom she did not name), herself the borough librarian of Hampstead, they would have a house which faced the heath, and five children . . . She had momentary misgivings as she found herself outside the door and thought of the embarrassment she would suffer when the rest of the staff learnt of her good fortune, but she knocked resolutely. Mr. Phillimore was sitting at his desk doing The Times crossword puzzle, but he courteously put it to one side when she entered and rose to greet her, looking like one of the sadder animals in Alice in Wonderland stranded on an unfamiliar shore, eyebrows thick as thatch shielding the eyes, a shaggy walrus moustache defending the lower part of his face. He mumbled through the moustache:
‘Ah, Miss . . .’ Her name eluded him; he had never been able to attach names to faces which was one of the reasons why his committee meetings were such a nightmare to him. He looked down at a note on his desk and said, ‘Miss Holland Park . . . no, Bayswater . . .’
Kerren said, ‘Mrs. Shaw’ and he blew out the moustache in gusty relief. ‘Do sit down, Mrs. Shaw.’ As he repeated her name, he looked as pleased as though he had performed a prodigious feat of memory. Kerren sat down, putting her knees close together and folding her hands in her lap to indicate composure. Mr. Phillimore, who was not at all composed, pulled a neat pile of papers towards him and proceeded to rumple them as only a really inspired rumpler can. While he was engaged in this exercise, he said:
‘Now let me see, how long have you been with us?’
‘Two months, nearly three.’
‘Really?’ A few papers went to the floor, he flapped at them and then decided to leave them there. ‘And you have settled in by now?’
‘Oh yes.’ It had taken a day and a night watch to settle in at a new camp; after three months she reckoned that she knew as much about the library as he did. At least she knew the names of the staff.
Mr. Phillimore cleared his throat and said, ‘I hear good reports of your work.’ He made a further attack on the pile of papers and then glanced at Kerren as though to assure himself that she was still there. ‘You do like your work. Miss . . .?’
‘Very much. I’ve always been interested in books.’
‘Have you really?’ He sounded mildly surprised. His hand shot out and pounced on a buff-coloured form which was sticking out half-way down the pile. He pulled it free, scattering papers in all directions.
‘Well, I’m pleased to tell you . . .’ He studied the form to make sure what it was that he was pleased to tell her. Kerren’s mouth was dry as she waited for the great moment. The spring sunlight fell across his desk, its beam speckled with gold-dust. The moment was vividly recorded in her mind. ‘I’m pleased to tell you,’ Mr. Phillimore raised his voice triumphantly, ‘that I have recommended you for transfer to the permanent staff.’
‘The permanent staff?’ Kerren had imagined that she was already permanent.
‘Subject to a satisfactory medical report, of course . . .’ He peered at her through the protective thatch, conscious that something odd had happened to h
er face. ‘You are . . . I mean, as far as you know, you haven’t . . .?’
‘I’m perfectly healthy.’
‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’ He gave a sigh of relief and stood up, stretching out his hand. ‘Congratulations.’
Kerren took his hand.
‘Thank you. But what does it mean?’
‘It means that you are permanent. Miss Arnold.’
‘Does it affect my immediate position?’
‘Well, I suppose it will affect your pay.’ He looked around, as though drawing the information out of the dim recesses of the room. ‘You will have to contribute to the superannuation fund, so you may not get quite so much money. But it will mean that you will have a pension when you retire.’ He edged round the side of the table and steered her gently to the door. ‘If there are any details you want to enquire about, I should have a word with Mr. Bartholomew; he really deals with these matters. Only he likes me . . . I mean, I like . . . to see members of staff on these occasions.’
The telephone rang: his secretary always came to his rescue after ten minutes. The door was shut firmly and the would-be librarian of Hampstead retraced her steps to the work-table.
‘I’m permanent,’ she said to Miss Nimmo as she inspected a tattered copy of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. ‘The first nail in the coffin!’
‘You’ll marry again, my dear,’ Miss Nimmo said.
‘I don’t know so much.’ But as she worked, she glanced out of the window from time to time at the grass dappled with crocuses and after a while in spite of her disappointment, she began to sing:
‘I know where I’m going
And I know who’s going with me;
I know who I love,
But the de’il knows who I’ll marry.’
The superannuation contribution was a blow, though. Things had been easier lately and she had managed to put a little money aside for a trip to Ireland in the summer. She had even entertained the idea of buying a new dress. A review of her wardrobe convinced her, however, that her navy linen dress could be brightened with a scarf or belt. She decided to limit her expenditure to the purchase of a pair of nylon stockings. Nylons could be purchased without coupons at a shop near The Elephant and Castle provided one was prepared to queue at six in the morning. This in itself was an experience not to be missed. She arranged to go with two of the married women at the library. They agreed to meet at Oxford Circus station at half-past five.