Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  Molly had gone back to the West Coast and wrote occasional cool notes in response to Lexie’s letters, but she showed no sign of demolishing the barrier that stood between them, in spite of Lexie’s efforts to make her letters cordial. One evening, when she and Max were dining at their favourite corner table in the Algonquin’s Oak Room, she let him see how much that hurt.

  ‘Will it be better once we’re married, Max? Will she start to show me any affection then? The sort she shows you? And why does she manage to love you so well when she didn’t know you when she was a child? I was always there, always cared — yet now you’d think that — oh, I don’t know —’ She stared down into her wineglass and shook her head.

  ‘For an intelligent woman you can be very obtuse, my darling,’ he said. ‘It’s because she does love you, because she did grow up with you, that she’s so difficult now. It’s easy to care about me, I arrived out of the blue when she’d grown up, a ready-made father, and maybe even a rather glamorous one, what with being a naval officer at the time; so falling in love with me was the easiest thing in the world. I’ve got no blemishes, you see — I never stopped her from doing what she wanted when she was small, or disciplined her, or gave her any memories of being a hard-done-by child. She could take me on as an equal and be as loving as she liked. There aren’t any risks in loving me, are there? But you — you’re deeply embedded in her. If you like, you were a sort of father to her — but only the heavy sort — earning the money, making the painful decisions about moving her home from New York to London, all those things. And to add to that there’s her feeling of loss over Barbara and over you — she lost you too, you see, when she discovered what she did about you and Barbara at the age she was — she must have felt bereft, out on her own. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see she behaves to you as she does because she loves and needs you, and she’s furious about that? That until she stops feeling the need, she won’t be able to allow herself to show the love?’

  She had been staring at him all the time he talked, turning her glass between her fingers, and now she laughed a little shakily. ‘My darling,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘You sound like Peter from the show, after he’s been to see his shrink. It’s the fashionable thing to do these days in New York, to go to a psychiatrist, and he’s nothing if not fashionable. He talks like that after one of his sessions —’

  ‘If his psychiatrist talks as clearly as I did, then he’s an unusual psychiatrist,’ Max said a little tartly. ‘It’s not that I mean that I’m such a miracle of clarity — it’s just that all those I’ve ever met spout the most frightful jargon. No, Lexie, don’t try to dodge it that way. You know what I mean. You’re not stupid.’

  ‘No,’ she said and ducked her head, not wanting to look at him. ‘No, I suppose not. But I’m hurt and —’

  He took her hand, making her relinquish the wineglass. ‘Of course you are. But it’ll get easier. Just give her time. Once we’re married, it’ll be easier. When she’s learned to live with her jealousy —’

  ‘Jealousy?’ Her head snapped up at that. ‘Molly, jealous of me? When she’s so young and so beautiful and —’

  ‘Well, of course she is! You’re a top liner, and she’s still trying to make it — she gets only small parts. You know, that was a lousy contract poor Barbara signed for her, a dreadful contract. She’s been cheated all down the line — she gets very little money, and when any decent part comes up Carter’s refuse to release her. She’s been a difficult character at the studios and they’re punishing her for it. It’s not unusual in Hollywood, you know! I’ve done my best to sort things out for her, legally, but it’ll be a couple of years yet before she finally gets rid of Carter’s, and in the meantime she barely scratches a living. You get all the attention and the money and —’ He hesitated. ‘And me, I suppose.’

  She felt a sudden stab of shock. ‘And you?’ she said, hating herself for the idea that came into her head. ‘She’s jealous because you’re marrying me?’

  ‘I think so. She thought I was hers, when you didn’t know we’d found each other. And now you’ve come between us. From her point of view, of course. Not from mine.’ And his hand tightened on hers. ‘Never from mine.’

  She made a grimace of distaste. ‘You can’t mean that —’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a revolting idea.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That she’d be jealous of me because of you — you make it sound —’ She tried to laugh lightly, and it came out as a sort of giggle. ‘You make it sound like something out of a bad French novel. All that steamy illicit sex.’

  He stared at her for a moment and then nodded, understanding. ‘Well, I hadn’t thought of that, but I see what you mean. No, she doesn’t have any sexual feelings for me, Lexie. You needn’t worry about that. But she does need a man she can feel safe with.’ He hesitated. ‘She’s very bad at men. She’s had some unhappy affairs these past few years. Ever since she got to Hollywood. It wasn’t easy to be a seventeen-year-old there in the last year of the war. The place was packed full of uniforms and doom, and she wasn’t very clever at dealing with all that —’

  ‘My God, but you know a lot about her!’ she burst out. ‘Does she tell you everything about herself? Even about her love life?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘Who else has she got that she can trust?’

  ‘There’s me, for God’s sake. There’s me! I’d have listened, I’d have helped. I wasn’t that far away.’

  ‘She felt you were. Please, Lexie, don’t punish yourself this way. You can’t change the way things are with you two overnight. You’ve got to take each day as it comes, between you and Molly. But not between us. We’re all right. Isn’t that what matters most?’ He looked at her with his face suddenly full of naked fear, and she leaned forward and touched his cheek with one finger.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course it is. I’m being greedy again. I want everything and I want it at once. You and Molly too. And I can’t have that, can I? But I’ve got the most important part, and I wish I hadn’t been a fool and waited so long.’

  They made love that night, back at her apartment, a tiny box of a place on Central Park West that she had moved into as a stopgap when she had come back to New York six years earlier, and had never got round to leaving. For the first time she was glad it was so small and so very intimate, for it made it all so easy and natural. He had taken her back there after dinner and she had put her key into his hand when they had come to her door on the eleventh floor, and he had looked at it and then at her and then opened the door. There had been no talk, no drama about it; they had just quietly gone to her small bedroom and undressed and slipped into each other’s arms as though it was something they had done every night of their lives for twenty years, and as Max said, later, when they lay drowsily curled up together listening to the distant wail of police cars and the hum of the traffic far below them. ‘Time doesn’t matter any more. Does it? It’s always been like this.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and yawned and fell asleep as suddenly as a baby. She slept dreamlessly all night, to wake refreshed and comfortable to make love again, but this time it was more passionate, more hungry, and much more urgent, and it left her shaken and breathless, for he showed in every possible way that his need for her was as intense as it had been twenty-four years earlier. And, what was even more surprising, his touch woke in her an intensity of desire that amazed her. All through the long years of working and struggling and assiduously courting her voracious god of success she had ignored sex; she hadn’t believed it mattered to her, had returned in her mind to the long-ago days when as an almost-adult, just emerging from the chrysalis of childhood, the sweating leering appetites of men had seemed to her to be boring and stupid. It had been then, as it had for the past long years, something irrelevant in her life; her body had belonged to her and only her, and no one, she had been certain, would ever invade it. Even that first time they had made love, she and Max, on the river bank at Maidenhead on that glo
wing October afternoon, it had not been like this, and she was almost afraid of what happened to her that morning.

  But he touched her cheek and kissed her and went padding away to the little bathroom to whistle his way through a shower and struggle with her delicate little razor to deal with his stubble, leaving her to stare at the sunlit window at the foot of the bed, her mind in a turmoil. How had she been able to live without this sort of satisfaction for so long? How could she have been so blind about herself, so totally unknowing of her own needs, to have let time eat up so much of her life in such a sterile way?

  And that thought had frightened her, made her tumble out of bed herself to shower (a crowded giggling operation in the available space) and then make breakfast for him, anything to stop herself thinking of that. She had success, enormous success; to consider even for a moment the possibility that it had all been hollow, a spurious and useless substitute for the real life that had been waiting in the wings all this time — it was out of the question.

  The show closed in June, in spite of the fact that she had been awarded one of the much coveted Tony awards for her part in it, and the management gave a vast farewell party for her. She was glad Max couldn’t be there, because one of his most important clients was fighting a big fraud case in London. That meant she could really put a full stop to this side of her life. She had made up her mind that she would never return to the Broadway stage; that she would leave it at the full flood of her achievement, and if Max had been there, much as she loved him, that would have blurred the edges of the old and the new. He was tomorrow and Broadway was — had to be — yesterday. If there was a tinge of regret in her determination to cut clean she would not recognize it. She spent the evening at the party at her glittering best, chattering and laughing and teasing the people who actually wept because she was leaving, and refused to be distressed.

  ‘I’m changing everything!’ she told them joyously, one after another, as people told her she was mad to go when she could earn a fortune, write her own contracts for any future shows, could enjoy New York as her private empire. ‘I’m going to the new world, my new world — I’ve finished with this one — quite, quite, finished.’

  And so she had. She went back to England by sea, wanting to use the five days of the journey to sever completely the links with her American life and they were married in London seven weeks after she got back. They had talked about having a ‘proper’ wedding, a religious ceremony in a synagogue followed by a reception, but Max, a little surprisingly, refused.

  ‘I don’t need a canopy in shul,’ he said. ‘Not unless you do. And I know you don’t. I don’t want you going through something you don’t care about just to please me. I can be a Jew without keeping all the rules. I told you that years ago, do you remember? Well, it’s the same now. So no shul. And no reception either — just the people we care about, that’s all. Quite apart from anything else, to be getting married at our age is really a little comical, isn’t it? Can’t you imagine the sort of publicity there would be if we tried to make any sort of fuss over our wedding?’

  So it was a quiet affair at Caxton Hall, with just Bessie and a now clearly elderly but very dapper and vigorous Alex Lazar and Max’s brother and his family as guests, then a quiet dinner at the Savoy for them all, and home together to Max’s flat at Hanover Gate, just outside Regent’s Park. And that was that.

  And yet, of course, it wasn’t. The meagre nature of their wedding celebration opened the door to a richness of marriage that Lexie would never have believed possible. Each succeeding day brought them closer together, brought new satisfactions and delights in each other’s company. They retraced some of their old steps, going to the same sort of places they had gone to all those years ago when she had been in cabaret at the Café de Paris, but interspersing these outings with long peaceful evenings at home, sitting either side of the fireplace, ‘for all the world like Darby and Joan’, as Max said ruefully, reading or listening to the radio or, sometimes, watching television.

  It was that which brought her back to work. She had had no intention of ever working again; had made up her mind to it that now she was to be Mrs Max Cramer and that was all, but he had laughed at that.

  ‘Darling, do be reasonable!’ he’d said when she’d torn up yet another letter from New York offering her yet another part in a new show. ‘Of course I don’t want you to go back on the stage — unless you want to. I know better than to say you shouldn’t do what you feel is right for you — but if you do nothing at all you’re going to die of inanition. You need something more than pottering around the flat and cooking dinner occasionally. Anyway, you know perfectly well that I’m happy to eat out as often as you like. I’ve no special affection for home cooking. In my experience a chef who’s paid to feed me does it rather better than even the most loving of enthusiastic amateurs.’

  He’d kissed the top of her head as he made for the front door and the day’s work at his office in Bedford Row and the Law Courts. ‘Think about it, darling. Television, perhaps? They seem to need some real talent, going by the thing we saw last night.’

  So she did think about it, and after a few weeks of vacillation went to see one of the agents she remembered as being good, and almost shyly offered herself for what might be available.

  ‘Just for fun,’ she’d assured the man who sat and stared at her thoughtfully from behind the sort of heavy glasses that accountants wore. He was as unlike the agents she had worked with in New York as it was possible for a man to be; none of the old flamboyance and glamour about entertainment these days, she told herself, looking round his neat office with its shelves of ledgers and box files. This is high finance, not fun. For a moment she wondered if she was right even to consider working in this new medium; perhaps she was too old now to change to new ways and new ideas.

  But she wasn’t. She was offered an involvement in a short run of a sort of panel game, in which members of the public pitted their memories of past entertainers against those of the entertainers themselves, and she succeeded so well that the show was given an extension, and she was elevated to a major part in it. She enjoyed it, since it involved just one day’s work a week, and came to find a little gratification in the status it gave her as a celebrity again. She was recognized when she went shopping in Harrods or Harvey Nichols, asked for her autograph when she went to the theatre or dined out. It was amusing, and Max seemed to enjoy it too, basking in her reflected glory. So she accepted one or two more such television engagements, and spent the rest of her time being Mrs Cramer.

  That kept her agreeably busy. Max often needed to entertain clients or their contacts, and he now found it was much more agreeable to do that in his own home than in a restaurant. Lexie, with the aid of a local woman who came to clean and help with their dinner parties, became an adept if not too adventurous cook and was certainly an elegant hostess. She enjoyed the evenings spent charming dusty lawyers and abstracted businessmen, and took real delight in winning them over, as she would discover she had when Max came home jubilant with success after his cases. So with such small matters, and her regular visits to Bessie — who was still working contentedly, if for rather shorter hours, in Alex Lazar’s City office — time passed extremely agreeably.

  The years slid together with alarming ease. Their first wedding anniversary seemed to arrive quickly enough — their fifth even more suddenly. They were busy and happy and could have gone on being as they were; there was their work, and their many acquaintances — though they had few close friends, needing them so little, content as they were with each other — their regular letters from Molly (but no visits, although Max saw her occasionally on his many business visits to the States) and the rich fullness of the minutiae of daily life. Lexie would not have believed it possible she could be so happy while not pushing desperately to be successful at work, would not have thought there could be so much contentment in small things. She felt she had at last found the river that had led to her safe harbour, that the years of fi
ghting her way to survival on the high ocean of her ambition were safely behind her. She was content at last; she wanted no more, could not imagine ever needing more, and could have gone on as she was for always.

  And perhaps she would have done if Molly hadn’t at last decided to come to England to see them.

  45

  It has been a hot and heavy day, with people lying listlessly around on the yellowing grass in Regent’s Park and the air smelling faintly of melting tar as the traffic chewed up the roads and drivers swore irritably at each other. She had walked in the park for a while that morning, but had escaped home again gratefully, feeling the tension in the very air, as full of unease as any of the people she had heard talking as she passed them. War talk — it was dreadful to hear it again, and she felt tired and old. Not that she was all that old, she told herself stoutly as the decrepit lift rattled its way to her flat on the fourth floor. Fifty-five isn’t that old — but last time I was young and I could cope. Will it be the same this time? She thought confusedly of bombs and guns and ENSA and shivered. There can’t be a war — not again. There can’t be. Max must be right.

  Max had assured her there wouldn’t; he was deeply involved with the crisis, having clients with business interests in Suez, and his calm reassurance should have comforted her. But it didn’t, because there was Bessie and her reports of what Alex said. The old man was not quite as active as he had once been in his fund-raising activities for Israel — and at the age of eighty-eight, who could blame him? But he was as passionately interested in Middle Eastern matters as he had ever been, and busied himself with numbers of committees dedicated to Zionist affairs. During her daily visits to him he would talk interminably to Bessie of what was going on — and Bessie would telephone Lexie and report it all, anxiously. She too feared war, and Lexie had to soothe her, over and over again, telling her that it was all right, Max said it would be all right, not to worry — but all the same she worried, and everyone around them worried. London was an uneasy place to be that summer of the Suez crisis.