For three quarters of an hour they stood there, and bitterly complained and rejoiced in rumours of police intervention, faintings, and thefts – and then, slowly, the floor began to clear a little. They did not know whether it cleared because people had left voluntarily, or because people had been evicted, but clear it did, and a few couples from the co-educational schools ventured forth to dance. Janice, from her vantage point, managed to catch the eye of a boy to whom she had spoken on the boat, and terrorized, fascinated, he responded to her insinuations and oglings and came over to ask her for the pleasure of her hand. At this, Rosie, Katie, Heather, Isabel and Clara felt themselves put upon their mettle, and they swerved round, slowly, to expose their disdainful faces. The competition was, alas, horrific, as they had ill-advisedly placed themselves in a predominantly female quarter of the hall, where few boys were bold enough to venture. However, after a couple of dances had elapsed, Clara thought she spotted the civilized young man who had assisted her on the Channel crossing; once she had spotted him she turned rigidly away, so deep was her horror of imitating Janice’s conduct, but she lost nothing by it, for within a couple of minutes he presented himself, courteously, at her elbow.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I thought I saw you. Isn’t it the most shocking scrum? Why do you imagine we all stay instead of going?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Clara. ‘Perhaps we just don’t like to give up.’
‘Do you feel like trying to have a dance?’ he said.
‘It looks,’ she said nervously, ‘a little difficult.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind your toes being trampled on …’
She hesitated, sadly, desperately anxious to accept, absurdly delighted that he had asked her, that he had so coolly bothered to cross the room to ask her, and yet at the same time horrified by the thought of displaying herself, by the thought of dragging her hideous dress from its hole-in-the-corner obscurity, by the thought of dancing at all, for she did not know how to dance. All the dancing that she had ever done had been at three school dances, and in sessions for instruction in the art of the polka, the mazurka, and the tarantella, and she did not think they would be much help to her now. On the other hand, she did not feel that she could refuse him, because if she refused him, by what right and for what purpose had she gone there in the first place? Such a false position was not for her, nor for her was the taunt of cowardice, so she smiled and assented, and allowed him to drag her into the sparsest area of the room.
It was not, as it happened, too bad. The floor was so thickly covered that there was no space for displays of skill; the most that the most expert could do was to shuffle feebly back and forth. Clara, clasped to the young man’s bosom, reflected that he was in no position to notice her lack of grace. Nor could he possibly notice her dipping hemline. He held her quite tightly, and tried to prevent other people from banging into her. His hair was thick and shining and symmetrical like a yellow flower. She was proud of him, and of herself, but she was not too happy, for the strain was too great for happiness. He too seemed to feel some sense of strain, for he was too busy avoiding people to talk to her much; when he trod, helplessly, for the fifth time upon her foot, she stopped still, and said to him, lightly, and with a sense of great daring:
‘It really is too bad, don’t you think? Don’t you think we might give it up?’ The perfection of her tone, so perfectly deceitful and concealing, amazed her.
He stopped, and he seemed relieved.
‘It’s dreadful,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry I keep treading on you, I just can’t help it. Should you mind if we went to look for something to drink instead?’
‘Is there anything?’ she asked.
‘I thought I saw something,’ he said, ‘in one of the other rooms.’
And so she followed him, in search of a drink. She was delighted by the success of her bravery, because she was far happier talking than dancing. She liked to be good at things, and she was not good at dancing. They found some drinks, eventually, in a small beleaguered ante-room, where he fought his way through to the bar and acquired some fizzy orange.
‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ he said, as he returned modestly with his two bottles and straws, ‘but better than nothing.’
And they stood in a corner and drank them, and exchanged their names, at last: she much admired the clear way with which he presented his own. Peter Harronson, he said he was called. She thought the name faintly familiar, and faintly Scandinavian, but she did not like to ask where it came from, in case she should have known. Similarly, when they exchanged the names of their schools, she found herself immensely relieved when he declared that he was at Winchester, for she had heard of Winchester, she knew something about Winchester, she did not have to feign a non-existent knowledge of Winchester. Indeed, she was rather proud of the magnificent logic with which she countered his Winchester admission.
‘Ah, then,’ she said, sucking on her straw. ‘Then you must have been to Paris before.’
He did not even query her reasoning; he took it, for what it was.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘once or twice, I have.’
‘Well, then,’ she continued, with what seemed to her to be the very height of aware sophistication, ‘why ever did you want to come here on this sort of trip?’
He seemed, strangely enough, to be very slightly disconcerted by her question.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be amusing. And then, you know, the others were coming. And it gave one something to do with the holidays. And there were those lectures, too. They told me they’d be useful.’
‘Did they really?’ said Clara. ‘I thought they were pretty dismal, didn’t you? I mean, really.’
On this point, however, he did not follow her, for he clearly took her to be complaining of the endemic tediousness of all lectures, rather than of the inadequacy of this particular lot: he equally clearly did not wholly concede the point, for he said, faintly, falsely, without enthusiasm, ‘Oh yes, I suppose they were.’
And she, warned off intellectual discussion by years of experience, withdrew, and could think of no more to say. And he too seemed to have exhausted his conversational store; she thought that they would both have liked to continue talking, but they could think of nothing to say. They were too young. And in the silence, she grew more and more conscious of the impossibility of her dress, and of her scuffed and inappropriately coloured shoes, and of her warm face. She wanted to get away, and she did not know how to get away. All explanations, all excuses were crude and deadly, and she could not bring herself to make them, but she could not sit there either, contemplating her own slow lapse from grace. She was immobile, cruelly transfixed, but in the very moment of immobility she saw most clearly a time when such moments need not be. It was left to him to move. He rose to his feet, and said:
‘Should we go and see if there’s any more room for dancing? It might have cleared a little more by now.’
And she too rose, and found herself saying, ‘Thank you so much, but if you don’t mind I think I’d better go and see what’s happened to my face.’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course,’ and he even showed her the corridor that led to the Ladies’ room, and she escaped, and they escaped from each other. She stayed in the Ladies’ room for a long time, amongst girls fainting, and weeping and grieving over laddered stockings, and when she emerged he had disappeared. She was wholly relieved that he had gone, for his absence enabled her safely to join her friends, to receive their questions and their anecdotes, and to hear of the brazen, wonderful audacity of Janice, who had not yet returned to the fold, and who had been seen leading, yes, leading her captive from the floor, in search of fresher air and darker night.
In bed that night, Clara thought of Peter Harronson and his fair hair. And she thought of the Italian’s hand inside her stocking. And she thought of Walter Ash. Her life, she thought, seemed to be thickening up quite nicely.
The next morning, they
left Paris. The station from which they departed was being cleaned, and she thought, what a strange thing to clean, a station. What would they say in Northam, if anyone proposed to spend money on cleaning Northam Station? And then, looking at the workmen, and the yellow emerging stone, she almost noticed that the station was not intended to be a station but a work of art, a building ambitiously decorated with scrolls and figures and carvings: ill-decorated, but decorated nonetheless.
That summer she gained a place at London University, and parted from Walter Ash. Her parting from him took place in a field of buttercups and small cows; they had gone there together on their bicycles one hot afternoon, she with the intention of reading her book, and he with the intention of persuading her to remove as many of her clothes as possible. They lay on his jacket, and she tried to read while he tried to kiss her. She won. After an hour the sun clouded over, so they picked up their things and started back towards the fence where they had left their bicycles. At the far end of the field, by the gate, there was a group of small cows, and as Clara and Walter approached, these cows turned round to face them. They were in a solid line, between them and the gate. There were about twenty of them. They did not move.
Walter and Clara slowed down. Clara was frightened, but on the other hand she could see that they were only small cows. They were not even small bullocks. And she thought it was quite intolerable for Walter Ash to hesitate, even though she herself found it necessary to hesitate. She stood there, timidly, full of a most mordant rage. Then, pained beyond belief in some tender pride, she advanced alone upon the cows, and they parted softly and meekly before her and Walter Ash followed her, and they regained their bicycles.
And she thought, quite calmly: this isn’t good enough for me, I shall get further if I’m pulled, I can’t waste time in going first.
When Walter Ash rang her the next day she would not speak to him. She returned his letters unopened, and threw away his small gifts. She stayed indoors for the rest of the summer, lying on her bed, trying to read.
5
Clara knew that Clelia would contact her, and she did. Less than a week after their first meeting at the poetry reading, she found a message waiting for her, asking her to ring Clelia’s number, and she rang, and Clelia invited herself round to tea.
‘I would ask you to come here,’ she said, ‘but there seems to be some kind of disturbance going on, and I don’t want to add to it.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Clara, ‘do please come here, I should like you to come here.’
And she meant it, for she liked her college room, she was even mildly proud of it, and the thought of entertaining Clelia in it did not alarm her, though she had a deep aversion to the notion of entertainment, and had never in her whole three years at University embarked on the ritual tea parties or more ambitious sherry parties that mark the social life of such establishments. It was not so much meanness that restrained her, as a profound mistrust of her own organization: and also she felt, obscurely, that to invite people into her own room was to condemn them to boredom and unease. She recognized that this feeling was in part a hangover from her schooldays, when her occasional invitations to friends had invariably resulted in sessions of strained discomfort, presided over by the disapprobation, however concealed, of her mother; she had no precedent for successful hospitality. She had conquered this feeling sufficiently to allow her to accept visits from her friends, and had overcome the apologetic murmurs that used to assail her as she opened her bedroom door; she felt, in part, absolved by the wonderfully institutional shape of her room, which was on the third floor of a large block in the middle of Regent’s Park. The room was what it was, one of many, it meant nothing, it spoke of nothing, it betrayed her in no way. She enjoyed its lack of significance, much as she had enjoyed the bleak and dirty corridors of Battersby Grammar School when she was eleven years old. She made no attempts to decorate it, to domesticate it, to possess it; she let it be, and her things lay in it. Some of her friends bought cushions and pictures and even, extravagantly, curtains, in an effort to make rooms look homely, and though she liked the results, she viewed the aim with contempt.
As she sat and waited for Clelia, she looked out across the park, at the spring trees, and tried to concentrate on her Spanish, and thought of what she should do next, without this view, without the solace of a yearly grant, without the irreproachable (or now, through custom, irreproachable) excuse of study. Her Finals were approaching, and she had no idea of what she should do next, and indeed did not dare to think about the future for she knew that it offered her little in the way of readily acceptable projects. Her friends, all equally indecisive, had no need to hurry their decisions, for nothing lay at their backs, pulling them, sucking them, dragging at their sleeves and at their hems. But Clara knew that her mother expected her to go home.
The thought of going home was for her the final impossibility, but she could not see any satisfactory way of avoiding it. She could not see why her mother wanted her, nor what she expected her to do in Northam, and whenever she mentioned the subject to others they exclaimed in horror, commiserating with her, telling her that she must be firm, never for half a moment assuming that she could or would really do it. She said to them, sometimes, but she’s a widow, she lives all alone, she has no one, she seems to expect it of me: and they sympathized all the more, and said that they could see how hard it must be for Clara to break away. But nobody ever so much as hinted at the possibility that she might return. They all assumed, blandly, blithely, that she must stay in London, or go abroad; that the guilt must be endured, and no question about it.
Most of the time Clara assumed it too. Her years in London had merely strengthened her desire to live there for the rest of her life, and while she was there her mother seemed, most of the time, to be no more that a dreadful past sorrow, endured and survived. But then there were always the vacations. Clara dreaded the vacations, and tried to whittle them down as much as she could, by semi-obligatory study courses, and quasi-essential trips to the Continent to learn the languages she was studying, but despite these nibblings and thefts, she still found herself obliged to spend a great deal of time each year in Hartley Road. She had neither the money, nor, finally, the nerve to stay away. And these visits managed to reduce her to exactly the same stage of trembling, silent, frustrated anxiety that she had endured throughout her childhood; she felt, each time, that she had gone back, right back to the start, and that every step forward must be painfully retraced. It was not so, at the beginning of each new term she found it was not so, but it seemed to be so, and the same mixture of guilt and hate and sorrow would strike her anew, each time as forcefully, each time she got off the train at Northam Station. She found that she was not alone in her vacational penances, and that many of her friends endured similar harsh shocks and grating transitions, but she was alone in the way she took it. For she found herself incapable of struggling against it, as others did; while at home, she made no efforts to alleviate her lot. She sought no friends; she shut herself off, in the old familiar world of bedroom and drawing room, and her only amusement, for weeks on end, was the reading of her set texts. She lived in the house, as though there had never been another world, and when a boy she knew, who lived in Doncaster, asked if he could come over and take her out, she refused him, although she liked him, because she knew that she could not bear to allow herself to emerge. And so she continued, through three years, through a series of such violent changes; she inspected herself anxiously from time to time for signs of manic depression or schizophrenia, but she could find nothing but symptoms of increasingly quick recovery. In her first year, it took her a day or two to settle down to London, but in her last year she was there the moment she stepped on the train.
Nevertheless, she did not see that she could leave Northam for ever. She felt herself restrained from such freedom. And she sought, faintly, for compromise, for some way of life that would enable her to see her mother as often as a sense of duty obliged. She ne
ver allowed herself to suspect that duty might oblige her to return entirely, but the idea lay in the back of her head, as of some final, exhausting, bleeding martyrdom. She shunned it, she avoided it, but she could occasionally feel herself blench as she caught a rash and unguarded glimpse of it. She did not believe that she would ever do it, for she told herself that she was free; she thought that she would probably end by prolonging, in some way, her present situation, by returning for vacations and for long dead summers. Such a summer now stared her in the face, for she had, through indecision, failed to fix herself up any foreign excursions; she looked towards it and towards her approaching examinations, and felt sadly weak.
Clelia’s visit, however, was all that she had hoped for. She arrived most promptly, sat down on the bed, and proceeded to tell Clara the story of her life. It was an impressive narrative, and impressively narrated; Clara found her craving for the bizarre and the involved richly satisfied. The picture that emerged was highly confusing, because she could not follow all its references, despite Clelia’s efforts to explain herself; she found it impossible to sort out the complications of Clelia’s family, which seemed to contain, as well as a poet father, an equally if not more famous mother, and a large number of strangely named children. The mother puzzled Clara particularly, for Clelia evidently assumed that she needed no description or definition, and spoke of her as one whose name is a household word. Clara, already familiar with children of famous parents, and with children who believed their parents to be famous, could not believe that Clelia’s assumption was ill-founded, yet she could not even locate the field of Mrs Denham’s distinction. She had more success with the identities of various names that had been puzzling her since their last encounter, and most satisfactorily of all, she placed the baby. The baby belonged to a man called Martin, who ran (or owned, or managed) the gallery where Clelia worked. Clara was not at all sure what a gallery was, but from the conversation she managed to deduce that it dealt in paintings, and unlike the Tate and the National Gallery, dealt commercially. Clelia worked there because she painted: also because her parents pulled strings: also because she had been to art school: also because she had some highly inexplicit connection with Martin. All these explanations were proffered, haphazardly, one on top of the other, and from the excess of explanation Clara concluded that a job in a gallery such as Clelia’s must be something of a sinecure, and that Clelia’s attitude towards it was not wholly happy. The nature of her job there was, to Clara, wholly obscure, but then the nature of most jobs was obscure to her.
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