by Clare Clark
Irene squeezed through to join them. ‘Hello, Kit, darling. You look ravishing as always.’ Kissing him on the cheek, she intercepted the glass Bea was holding out to Oscar, dropped an olive in it, took a gulp and, sighing happily, handed it back. The gin was oily, swirled with cold.
‘Just making sure it’s not poisoned,’ she said. ‘Be an angel, Bea, and fix one of those for Phyllis.’
‘Where is she?’ Oscar asked.
‘Upstairs powdering her nose. She’ll be down in a minute.’
Oscar sipped his drink as Kit asked Irene about the play she was rehearsing.
‘Oscar and I shall come,’ he said. ‘We shall sit in the front row and scream like schoolgirls every time you make an entrance.’
‘How lovely,’ Irene said. ‘Only according to Miss Clough it is improper for men to see girls in men’s clothing. It’s brothers and fiancés only.’
‘Like Herod.’
‘Like Herod, only less compassionate.’
Behind Kit Oscar saw Phyllis hesitating in the doorway. He waved and she smiled, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Oscar’s heart turned over.
‘This is Phyllis,’ he said to Kit. Still laughing Kit turned. The laugh caught in his throat. Phyllis stared at him.
‘Phyllis,’ he said.
‘Hello, Kit.’ The words came out squashed. She did not look at Oscar.
‘Don’t tell me you two know each other?’ Irene said.
‘We do,’ Kit said.
‘Drink?’ Bea said, holding out a glass, but Phyllis did not take it. She just went on staring at Kit.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Kit said softly. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m all right. You?’
‘Pretty good.’ He gestured with his glass. ‘Legless as always.’
Nobody laughed. There was a silence. Irene took the glass from Bea and put it into Phyllis’s hand. Phyllis blinked at it in confusion. Then Irene slid her arm through Oscar’s. ‘Come and dance,’ she said. When he shook his head her arm tightened around his. ‘Come on. Bea, come with us. It’s a party, not a wake.’
Oscar looked helplessly at Phyllis but she only stared at her drink. Like a prisoner in irons Oscar allowed himself to be led away. He danced distractedly, heavily, his feet as clumsy as a clown’s. Several times he trod on Irene’s toes.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’
The gramophone record stopped, the needle skating over the shellac. Someone lifted it from the turntable, slid another from its sleeve.
‘One more?’ Irene said. Oscar shook his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said again.
She nodded. ‘You might want to give them a minute,’ she said gently.
Oscar went upstairs. He sat in a bedroom on a bed covered in people’s coats. He was there for a long time. When he came down the party was still in full swing. People were dancing in the hall and in the dark passage that led to the kitchen a couple were kissing. His heart flipped like a landed fish before he saw that it was not them. He could feel his hands trembling. Pushing past them more roughly than was quite necessary he stepped down into the kitchen. Someone had switched out the light. In the faint white gleam of the moon, abandoned glasses and bottles glittered like eyes. It was a moment before he saw her standing by the window, staring out into the darkness. She was alone. Slowly she turned to look at him. In her cupped hands she cradled a martini glass, half full. She held it out towards him. ‘Drink?’ she asked.
Oscar shook his head. There was a silence. Phyllis drank, emptying her glass.
‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ he said at last. ‘The man you loved. It was Kit.’
Phyllis put her glass on the counter and turned back towards the door. He could see her face reflected in the black glass, a pale oval with two holes for eyes. ‘He was at Roehampton. In my ward.’
‘Kit Ferguson.’
‘Yes.’
‘You said he didn’t love you. That’s what you said.’
‘Yes. Because he didn’t. Not the way I wanted him to, anyway.’
‘And you? Do you still love him?’
‘Oscar . . .’
Someone had turned up the gramophone. The music filled the kitchen, an old Joplin rag Oscar’s mother had liked to play on the piano. The contrariness of it, the intoxicating verve of the syncopations, had always made them laugh. He could hear laughter coming from the dining room now, the shiver in the wooden floor as they danced.
‘I thought I loved him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know then what love was supposed to feel like.’
‘Don’t lie to me. I saw the way you looked at him. The way you looked at each other.’
‘Oscar, stop it. You’re being ridiculous.’
The music was sharp and insistent inside him, forming and reforming like patterns in a kaleidoscope. ‘He gave you Moby-Dick, didn’t he?’
‘Actually, I gave it to him.’
Oscar thought of Ahab, dragged by the neck to the depths of the ocean by the whale, his tiny boat caught in the whirlpool of the sinking Pequod. ‘Melville,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Eleanor’s American friends were always giving us copies.’ In the dining room someone was singing loudly along with the Joplin. There was laughter and cheering, a piercing whistle. Phyllis stretched a hand out towards him. He did not take it. She let it fall. ‘Kit said you never told him you had a girl.’
‘He never asked.’
They were both silent. With a final extravagant crescendo the rag came to an end. There was a roar of riotous applause.
‘He said if I broke your heart he’d break my kneecaps,’ she said softly.
‘He broke yours.’
Phyllis’s spine sagged. Oscar glared at her. Then something inside him broke open and, taking her in his arms, he clasped her against him, holding her so close that there was no room for anyone but her.
The next day, leaning on the parapet of Trinity Bridge, he asked her to marry him. It was a bitter morning with a sharp north wind. She huddled in her coat, her hands buried deep in her pockets. The tip of her nose was red with cold.
‘You’re not saying yes,’ he said.
Phyllis stared down at the river. A pair of tufted ducks bobbed on the surface of the water. ‘You didn’t honestly think I would, did you?’
‘I know it’s absurd. I haven’t a job or any money, I’ll be an undergraduate for years. It doesn’t make the least sense. Except that it does. It makes sense of everything. I love you, Phyllis.’
‘Oscar . . .’
‘You love me too, you can’t tell me you don’t.’
‘This has nothing to do with love.’
‘What else can it possibly have to do with?’
‘Everything else. All the stuff that doesn’t matter.’
‘So you’re saying no?’
‘Yes. I’m saying no.’
‘No, not now, or no, not ever?’
Phyllis bit her lip. ‘Oscar, please don’t. We’ve talked about this. I thought you understood.’
‘It wouldn’t have to be like you think. You could still travel, still do all the things you want to do. I wouldn’t expect you to give up your work.’
‘How gracious.’ She sighed. ‘Oscar, I’m sorry but you know it isn’t like that. Men marry and carry on with their lives just as before. Women become . . . wives. I love you. You know that. But I can’t be a wife. I just can’t.’
‘Marriage is a prison.’
‘Yes. For me.’
Oscar was silent. He stared at the metal bolts that studded the Mathematical Bridge. According to Trinity legend, the bridge had been designed by Isaac Newton to be selfsupporting, its timbers holding together without the use of fastenings, only fellows of the University had taken it apart to see how he had done it and then been unable to put it back together. Like so many other stories, that one had turned out to be a lie.
‘Why did you ask me?’ she asked. She did not sound scornful or angry. She sounded sad. ‘Why did you ask me when you
already knew what I’d say?’
‘Because I love you. Because I thought you loved me.’
‘Not because of Kit?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Marriage is not a guarantee of happiness, Oscar. If anything it’s the opposite. Look at my parents. Or yours.’
‘We won’t be like them.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We won’t.’
Oscar held her gaze. Then he looked away. ‘So that’s it,’ he said flatly.
‘You make it sound like it’s the end of something.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Not if we don’t want it to be. Can’t we just go on the way we are?’
‘And how long do you think we can do that?’
‘For as long as we are happy.’
‘In separate houses, separate cities, seeing each other once a week? It’s not enough. Not for me.’
‘Then I’m sorry. It’s all I have to offer. For now. At least for the next few years.’
‘And then?’
‘I don’t know. We could live in sin.’ He stared at her. She shrugged awkwardly. ‘People do it. Some aren’t even struck down by thunderbolts.’
‘Why would you even consider that?’
‘Because I love you.’
‘Just not enough to marry me.’
‘Haven’t you listened at all? Marriage has nothing to do with it.’ She took her hands from her pockets and held them out to him. He hesitated, then he took them in his. She was not wearing her mittens. Her fingers were waxy with cold.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking you to keep house for me. Or even to have children if you really don’t want to. I just want us together, properly. For ever.’
‘Why? Are you afraid of the scandal?’ She was mocking him. For a moment the light in him dulled, like a cloud passing over the sun, and he did not love her at all. He let her hands drop.
‘Forget it,’ he said.
It was too cold to walk. They went to a teashop. There was steam on the inside of the window and a group of young men loudly insulting each other and complaining of their headaches. Neither of them said sorry. When they had drunk their tea Phyllis said that perhaps it was best if she caught the early afternoon train back to London. Oscar did not protest. They took the bus to the railway station, Phyllis’s suitcase on the seat between them. They did not speak. On the platform she kissed his cheek.
‘I’ll write when I get there,’ she said.
She was leaving for Malta in two days. She would be gone for six weeks. He put his arms around her stiffly, wretchedly, and she stood inside his embrace. She did not take her hands out of her pockets. He tried not to think of her standing with Kit, her arms around Kit’s neck. She looked good with Kit, in his mind’s eye.
‘All aboard,’ the guard shouted.
‘I ought to go,’ she said. Oscar nodded. She did not turn around as she boarded the train. The guard walked down the platform, slamming the doors. Then he blew his whistle and, with a scream of wheels, the train pulled out of the station, shrouding Oscar in a cloud of steam.
32
Jessica wrote to Gerald. She thanked him for all he had done for her, but after due consideration she had decided to hand in her notice at Woman’s Friend. She did not think that she was cut out to be a journalist. She hoped he did not mind that she was also enclosing a selection of articles written by one of her colleagues who had recently applied for a post at another of his publications.
She asked that I show these to you as a kindness to her. Having read them, I believe the kindness is all on her side. If there is anything precious to be salvaged from the wreckage of the last few years it is that women are more than daughters and wives and mothers, that we have a voice and a place not only in the home but in the world if we are only brave enough to stand up and speak out. Joan Pickard is brave, brave enough to speak the truth, however ugly or inconvenient. With your help she can be heard.
Below is an address where you can write to her. We may not be able to change the past but we can honour the present, as best as we know how. What other salvation is there?
She remained at the magazine for two more weeks. In the second week Eleanor came to London, en route for France. she asked if Jessica might be able to come with her to see Mrs Leonard the following morning and Jessica said she was sorry but she had to go to work. It was the closest either of them came to an apology.
Eleanor stayed at the flat for two nights. The second night Phyllis came to dinner. They did not talk much. There was not much to say. Phyllis was going away too, to a dig in Europe. She was quiet, withdrawn.
‘What about Christmas?’ Jessica demanded. ‘What about Father?’ And when Phyllis said that Father had given her his blessing, that he wanted her to go, Jessica retorted angrily that she was not sure Father even remembered who Phyllis was any more, that perhaps he had confused her with someone else. She wanted to argue but Phyllis would not stay long enough even to do that. She murmured something about a tutorial in the morning and, brushing her cheek against her mother’s, slipped away before dinner was even finished. It seemed to Jessica that she was more present in the flat when she had gone than she had been all evening. Eleanor went to bed. Jessica sat at the table as the candles burned to stumps and stared out at the starless sky. The reflected flames gazed like cat’s eyes from the dark glass, blinking yellow. She had never thought it would be her who would be the one to be abandoned.
She told Nanny that if a man tried to telephone she was to tell him Jessica was out. Nobody did. She supposed she was glad. Nanny patted her hand and said that London was no place for a young woman these days and that everything would be better once they were home. She hummed happily to herself as she moved around the flat and when she played Solitaire she slapped the cards down with a little gasp of triumph as though she had squashed a wasp. Her cheerfulness made the flat feel very cramped.
Instead, Jessica lingered at work. Lady Astor was standing for Parliament. The seat in Plymouth had been her husband’s until his father’s death propelled him into the House of Lords, prompting an emergency by-election, and if she won the forty-year-old American would be the first woman ever to take up a seat in the House of Commons. Joan and Peggy were petitioning Miss Cooke to include a piece about her candidacy in the magazine.
‘She is a symbol of hope for women throughout the country,’ Joan protested but Miss Cooke was adamant. There was no place for politics in Woman’s Friend, even if the candidate was a twice-married divorcée who lived in one of the grandest houses in England. Joan was furious.
‘The Saturday Review calls her candidacy a nursery romp and demands the disenfranchisement of Plymouth for frivolity and corruption and we can’t even run a half-page on why women need women in Parliament?’ she raged to Peggy and Jessica over lunch at the Busy Bee. ‘What does the Bottlewasher think our readers are going to do, knit themselves into a revolutionary frenzy?’
‘We should run a competition,’ Peggy said. ‘Crochet a Communist.’
Joan laughed, despite herself. ‘Bake a Bolshie.’
‘There must be a book on how to fold one out of tissue paper.’
‘Dear Mrs Sweeting, can bicarbonate of soda bleach the stain of feminist sedition from my soul?’
Peggy stopped at the draper’s on the corner for needles. She told Jessica and Joan not to wait. It was so cold in the stairwell that Jessica could see her breath.
‘Did you ever hear anything back from Perspective?’ she asked Joan as they climbed. Joan shook her head.
‘I think that one bit the dust.’
‘Surely there’s still a chance? It’s only been two weeks.’
‘They would have written by now. They turn these things around awfully quickly.’
‘I meant to say, I thought the articles you sent them were first-rate.’
‘Thank you. And thank you for your help. I’m very grateful, truly.’
‘Except that I wasn’t any help, was I?’
>
‘You were. You gave my work to Mr Cardoza. Didn’t you?’
‘Of course I did. It’s just that my timing . . . well, it was pretty awful.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Mr Cardoza and I, we’re . . . we’re no longer friends. I can’t believe he would have done anything, you know, to spite me, I’m sure he wouldn’t, but I’m just so sorry. I really hope it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t mess things up for you. You deserved that job. You’re a wonderful writer.’
Joan stopped so suddenly that Jessica almost cannoned into her. ‘Is that why you’re leaving the magazine?’ she demanded. Her cheeks were pink from the cold and the climb. ‘Because of Mr Cardoza?’
Jessica hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Sort of.’
‘He didn’t ask you to, did he?’
‘No, of course not. I just thought maybe it might be time. You know. To stop.’
‘To stop what?’
‘Making mistakes?’ Jessica offered with a weak laugh.
Joan did not laugh back. ‘And it’s not a mistake to give up this job?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
Joan was silent, one fist bouncing on the banister. Then, folding her lips together, she shrugged and went on up the stairs.
That afternoon, Jessica answered her last letter as Mrs Sweeting. In Plymouth the voters were going to the polls. It was getting dark and raindrops wriggled like tadpoles diagonally across the stippled glass of her window. The window frame was leaking. There was a puddle on the painted window sill, peppered with smuts.
You say you have been walking out with your young man for the past six months but, although he takes you to the pictures and buys you chocolates and all your friends regard him as your sweetheart, he has never shown you the affection. Well, for the love of peace, Crushed Strawberry, stop being such a complete and utter wet blanket. What on earth are you waiting for? Either throw the cold fish over, and his violet creams with him, or fling your arms around him and kiss him for all you are worth. How else will you ever know if he wants to kiss you back?