The Solitary Child

by Nina Bawden

  “Is that Mrs. Foster?”

  She nodded, twisting her hands together. “She comes sometimes in the afternoon—when her husband is on night shift, I think. It doesn’t make any difference to me, now I live alone, and it’s more convenient for her. We all have to fit in with each other these days.”

  She looked at me with a frightened, apologetic air.

  “And you were hoping no one would see me? Least of all Mrs. Foster?”

  Her voice was pleading. “I’m sorry, really I am. Of course I wanted to see you. Mrs. Foster doesn’t matter. It’s just that I was unprepared.…” I got up and went to the door. “Harriet, don’t go. I’ll make tea.…”

  I was shaking and cold. “I don’t want to embarrass you.”

  She came towards me, troubled and anxious, holding out her hands. “Please, Harriet. It’s all so difficult. Be fair to me.”

  “All right. I’ll go.” I grabbed at the handle of the door and jerked it towards me. The sharp edge hit me on the temple, just above my eye.

  My mother said, in a high, alarmed voice, “Dear, have you hurt yourself?” and then the kitchen door opened and Mrs. Foster came into the hall.

  It was an undignified exit. I said good-bye to my mother, and she took me in her talcumed arms and kissed my cheek. I don’t remember what I said to Mrs. Foster or whether I spoke to her at all or she to me. I remember how she looked, standing in a stained, flowered apron, a duster in her hand, her hair tied up in a piece of cloth. There was a mauve flush on her cheeks and her eyes were bright and speculative and sly. She was the first person who had ever looked at me like that.

  I ran the half-mile to the station, splashing in the rain-filled gutters, so that when I got there the hem of my skirt was heavy and wet. I caught the London train as it was leaving the platform. The corner seat was empty; I huddled close to the greasy window, staring out at the cramped rows of lighted houses, the dim sidings, the grey rain. There were two men in the carriage. I was suddenly too embarrassed to repair my make-up in front of them and scrubbed at my face with my handkerchief, peering furtively at my reflection in the carriage window. Both the men were reading evening papers and neither of them had glanced, even momentarily in my direction, but I felt defenceless and exposed as if everyone was watching me and whispering behind their hands.

  James was waiting for me at the barrier. He was hatless and wearing a British warm which made him look oddly out of date and young. His collar was turned up, shading his face from the harsh station light, his back turned, as if deliberately, to the moving crowd.

  He kissed me and said, “Did you make it up?”

  “I think so. But she was worried in case her charwoman should see me.” My laugh was high and too loud.

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “I ran into a door and bumped my head. I always look like this when I bump my head. I must have a thin skull.”

  “Did you bathe it?”

  “There wasn’t time. I had to run to catch the train.”

  “Why did you have to run? I wasn’t expecting you for another half hour.”

  “But you were waiting.”

  He smiled. “Only because I had nothing else to do.”

  I said, “I’m glad. Can we have some tea? I’m awfully thirsty.”

  The station hotel was closed and we went to an A.B. C. It was full of typists from the city offices and women who had come in from the suburbs for a day’s shopping. It was very hot and bright and anonymous. We fetched cups of tea from the steamy aluminium counter and sat at a plastic-topped table.

  I said, “My mother’s a fool. She doesn’t matter.”

  He stirred his tea and watched me. “You think she does, don’t you? It must seem to her that I come from a completely different world. A world as remote from her own as the one Alice found beyond the looking-glass.” He sounded sad and helpless. He went on, impatiently, “I’m not giving you a chance, am I? You ought to be in love happily and get fun out of it.”

  “And have a nice white wedding with the neighbours staring and jolly relations throwing confetti. Don’t be turgid, darling. I am happily in love.”

  His face was sober. “It’s not what I mean. You feel responsible for me already, don’t you?”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “Not like this. When we’re with other people, you watch them all the time as if you’re afraid they’ll say something tactless or unkind. All the life goes out of your face and you look ten years older.”

  I fiddled with my cup. “Of course I’m afraid for you. It’s part of being in love.”

  “It shouldn’t be. Not until we’ve been married for a long time and know the things that are likely to hurt. Not so early on.”

  “I’m happy. I love you more than anything else in the world. Won’t that do for a start?”

  “Bless you.” He sounded like a kindly uncle. Then, “I didn’t want you to miss anything.”

  “Am I missing anything? I’ve never been in love till now. Were you happier before?”

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  But his smile was tired. I wondered if he had grown so sure that unhappiness was normal that he refused, deliberately, everything else that was offered to him. As if to be happy was a kind of cheating.

  He said, “I bought a television set this afternoon.”

  “Why?”

  He grinned. “I thought you’d like one. No, that’s not true. I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a set for ages.”

  I laughed. “Even the middle classes are buying television sets nowadays.”

  He said seriously, “Isn’t snobbery extraordinary? If you’re interested in the arts, you should be looking forward, not backwards. Television is the art form of the future, in fifty years’time no one will read a book unless it’s a textbook. It’s important to keep in touch.…”

  “You make it a kind of moral duty.”

  He didn’t smile. “Perhaps it is.”

  As we left the A.B.C. I wanted to cry. It was going to be a bad evening. We were going to be married to-morrow and it didn’t bring us any closer. In the taxi we sat apart, alone in our separate corners. We went to the theatre and saw an American musical. James bought me a box of chocolates and was very polite as if he were taking me out for the first time. In the intervals we scrambled for gin and tonic at the bar, and squashed our hasty cigarettes in trays of sand at the curtained entrance to the auditorium. The songs were good, the comedy bright and efficient; it produced no answering spark in either of us.

  We came out dulled, with aching eyes. The rain had stopped and the night was clear and star-filled.

  James said, “It’s our last night in London. Where do you want to go?”

  He gestured at the sparkling streets as if the whole bright city lay before us. I stared at a winking Bovril sign.

  “I don’t know.” I was overwhelmed by the changeability of people towards each other. “Do you really want to marry me?”

  There was a long silence. I didn’t look at him. My eyes were burning.

  “What an extraordinary thing to ask,” he said in wonder.

  Sullenly, I scraped the toe of my shoe along the pavement. “Is it?”

  He took my arm roughly and marched me down a side street. We stopped in front of a hoarding that hid a bomb site. He twisted me round to face him. His face was pale and his hands, holding my arms, trembled, so that I could feel it through my coat. He was not easily emotional, so that when the control slipped it was somehow physically exciting.

  “It was the last moment to make you feel insecure,” he said. “I am abominably selfish. Harriet, forgive me.”

  I nodded and the tears rolled down my face.

  “You are dear and beautiful and good and of course I want to marry you. But I’m an awfully bad buy, my darling.”

  “Because of what happened before?”

  “I suppose so.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, nothing at all. The past was his own, harsh burden an
d it excluded me. But the present was in my hands, and the future. I felt very strong and very happy.

  I said, “I don’t mind where we go as long as we stay together. I don’t want to go home to-night. Do I have to?”

  For a moment I was afraid, but only afraid that he would be shocked or laugh at me.

  He didn’t laugh. He smiled with pleasure. “I think that could be arranged,” he said.

  We were married early in the morning. There was a wedding party in the waiting-room at the registry office. The bride was a tall girl wearing a peacock blue velvet coat and a hat with a tall feather. She had a clear, lovely skin and enormous eyes with rather too much white round the corners so that when she opened her mouth and showed her long, beautiful teeth, she looked a little like a horse. The man was shorter than she was, dark, with a neat moustache. He had shaved himself so closely that his cheeks and chin were covered with small, red scratches. He had a coarse, thick voice which sounded out of place beside the girl’s careful refinement. The two middle-aged women wore tight, black coats and expensive buttonholes. Their faces were heavily made up; they looked like clowns with purple mouths and drifts of white powder in their veined cheeks. There was one elderly man who looked uncomfortable in his neat, navy suit; the collar of his white shirt was too tight for him, he fumbled at it from time to time with thick, hairy fingers.

  The party laughed a great deal and made jokes that ended in gales of laughter half-way through as if they all knew each other well and had heard the jokes so often that they knew them by heart, using them as a means of communication instead of ordinary conversation.

  James and I sat in the corner on upright chairs. We smiled stiffly at each other from time to time and watched the tall girl and her bridegroom. I decided that she was probably a mannequin; she wore her clothes with the right kind of conscious elegance and she was extremely angular and boney. I wished I had not been too shy to ask James for a flower to pin on my coat. I was sure we didn’t look like two people who were going to be married.

  I hoped the other couple would be married first so that James and I could be alone in the waiting-room for a little while. He looked sadly romantic, like a poet, and there was a hint of apprehension in his eyes that had been there ever since we left the hotel. We had entered the registry office by a side entrance; James had told the taxi-driver to wait.

  The registrar came and asked us to come to the office. The party stopped talking as we crossed the room and stared at us. The man who had come to fetch us had a deaf aid. He said, as we walked down the corridor, that we must be sure to speak up as something had gone wrong with the mechanism and he wasn’t hearing very well this morning. I took James’s hand and squeezed it, hoping he would smile, but he didn’t look at me. The man was very nice and smiled all the time as if he wanted to put us at our ease. Once or twice he looked at James in an odd, puzzled way; I hoped James wouldn’t notice. If he does, I thought, I shall tell him afterwards that it was only because he looked so reluctant, as if it were a shot-gun wedding.

  The office was decorated with flowers in wicker baskets as if they had tried hard to make the ceremony a bright affair and not just a formality. It was all over very quickly and was short and legal, not an occasion for tears and laughter like the wedding service in church. The registrar shook hands with us both and gave me the certificate as though it were important for me to have my marriage lines as a proof of respectability. I wondered what to do with them. It seemed rude to put them in my handbag like just any document. Just as we were leaving a boy came in with a telegram and the registrar called us back and gave it to us. It was from my mother, wishing us happiness. It had been sent from a post office in the adjoining suburb, one that she never visited ordinarily, and I knew she had been ashamed to send the telegram from the local one. I showed it to James and kept my thumb over the post office address although it was unlikely that he would see the significance of it.

  I was still holding the telegram and the marriage certificate when we went out of the side entrance into a sunny winter’s morning.

  Our taxi was waiting by the kerb and between us and the taxi there were two men.

  The one who came up to us was not really a man, only a boy. A boy with a spotty, adolescent chin and tired, sophisticated eyes. A greasy raincoat flapped loosely round his skinny body.

  He said, “Could we have one of you smiling at each other, please, Mr. Random?”

  His voice was shabby genteel; the knowing eyes flicked from James to me and back to James again.

  James said “Go to hell,” and pushed me towards the taxi. Somehow, the boy was between us. He was smiling.

  “It’s only our job,” he said.

  James’s mouth was set and his mouth moved stiffly, like a puppet’s mouth.

  “Get into the taxi, Harriet,” he said. He pushed the boy in the chest. The photographer’s flash came as I had one foot on the running board, and James put up an arm to hide his face and mine. The taxi moved off and the boy’s face appeared, momentarily, at the window. He was grinning angrily; his teeth were small and crowded, dirty with nicotine.

  He said, “Better luck this time,” and bobbed backwards as the taxi changed gear. There were traffic lights at the corner of the road; mercifully, they changed to green as we reached them.

  James was crumpled in his seat. He was breathing hard as if he had been running.

  I said. “It’s all right, darling. It’s all right. It’s over now.”

  He groped for my hands and held them.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. This is a hell of a good beginning.”

  “It might have been worse,” I said. “He was a scruffy young man. I shouldn’t think he rates more than a line in the evening papers.”

  I hoped the photograph wouldn’t come out. I hoped if it did, we wouldn’t look furtive. It would have been better to stand still and smile and let them take their picture. A happy picture of James Random and his second wife. Not a frightened couple hurrying into a taxi, cowering behind an upraised arm. Mr. and Mrs. Random. Two years ago Mr. Random was acquitted of the murder of his first wife. Could they put that sort of thing? Or was it libel?

  James said, “He worried you, the little bastard. Didn’t he?”

  “No. He was a silly boy. Just doing his job, that’s what he said.”

  James said, “I’d like to wring his neck.”

  The taxi jolted into a traffic jam. My feet scuffed against something on the floor. I picked up the telegram and our marriage certificate.

  “Look after that, young woman. It’s important evidence. Here, give it to me.”

  He smoothed it out on his knee. He gave me a wry grin. “‘James Random, Widower.’ Silly, isn’t it? It sounds so innocent.”

  I wanted to say: Look, you fool. Stop saying that kind of thing. Stop being sorry for yourself, rubbing your own nose in the dirt.

  But I was over imaginative on his behalf. And too much in love.

  Chapter Three

  When they set him free, he told me, he had gone straight home. It was not a decision; no other course occurred to him. He took the morning train from the Assize town. He was carrying the suitcase he had packed when they arrested him; he might have been going home after a long week-end.

  Only when he reached the familiar station did he realise it was not an easy thing to do. He was going to take a taxi, but when he saw Talbot waiting with his heavy-bodied Daimler he took fright. He had known Talbot since he had been a boy on holiday from prep school. He looked as he had looked then, perhaps a little greyer, a little slower in his movements. But he could not face him.

  He bolted back into the grey, arched station, taking refuge in the buffet, watching the wide mirror behind the counter for faces that he knew. He reacted, physically, like a man in the extremity of fear; his heart was pumping dizzily and his hands were sweating and cold. He sat on a high stool at the bar, fighting for self-control. After a little, the panic died and he left the buffet. He walked through the back
streets of the town and waited for the local bus in the market-place.

  When it came he sat in a front seat, quite still, staring out of the window at the covered stalls, listening, as the passengers climbed in, to the familiar Welsh voices.

  He knew every rut of the uneven road that lay between him and safety, every farm, every hill. He sat watching the sour winter countryside unfold, the trees, bare as bone, the granite pits like a scar in the side of the hills.

  Of course, in the end, someone recognised him. There was a sudden rush of whispering behind him and then silence. They were five miles from home. He sat like stone, watching the road.

  The bus stopped at the end of his lane. It was a moment he had dreaded but when it came he took it calmly. He lifted his case down from the rack and walked up the gangway, the muscles rigid in his face.

  Once the bus had gone the country was silent. He was alone and free. He walked, between high, still hedges, under a flat sky. The lane wound downwards to a shallow stream and then rose steeply to the gates of his empty, shuttered house. The suitcase was heavy with the books he had read, over and over, in prison, and his arm was aching.

  When he reached the house he put the suitcase down and looked about him. The evening mist lay ghostly on the ground, a dog barked in the distance. He opened the front door with his latch-key and bolted it behind him.

  The house smelt sweet and stale. After his arrest they had put dust-covers over the furniture and his daughter had gone to live with her grandmother. He moved about the rooms among the shrouded chairs. In the end, he found some blankets and made a bed on the sofa in the big, ground-floor drawing-room. He stayed there, unnoticed, for three days. There was tinned food in the larder and he existed on that, drinking milkless tea and black coffee. Once, when the day was very cold, he broke up an old tea chest he had found in the cellar and built a fire in the grate. The chimney must have been blocked with soot because the smoke poured into the room, almost choking him. He put the fire out and huddled under the blankets.