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by Henry Green

  “Why, being like me,” she elaborated. “Not having a real father all my life. That’s been my trouble. Oh it mightn’t matter for a boy, but it’s very different where girls are concerned.”

  “Rotten luck,” he said.

  “No, Charley, you never did, did you?”

  “What would you give for me to tell?”

  “But this is serious,” she entreated. “You can’t play about with this. It’s all there is that people the same as us can do with their own lives.”

  “A man never knows if the kid is his own, or not.”

  “Now there’s no need for you to be sarcastic,” she protested. “I haven’t brought you all this long way for that,” she said, with more truth behind the remark than she proposed to reveal. “Can’t you be serious, once in a while,” she begged, although he was the most serious of men.

  The snow, and the sun above, lit her face so that each eyelash stood out on its own, and the grain of her skin, until, with those blue eyes, and the way she had of addressing him, on which he had come to rely for peace of mind, and with her walking by his side, she grew upon him, became an embodiment of everything comforting, and true, and good. So much so, that he lost the drift of this argument. She had to press to get him to say he did not really know if he had a child.

  “But who with?” she demanded. She was getting upset.

  “That would be telling.”

  “Oh, I believe it was only your old Rose,” she brought out at last, very much relieved. “And there was me, supposing all that over and done with, ages ago. Did you love her very much then, Charley?”

  “It was a long time back.”

  “That’s not much help to a girl,” she replied. “Did you or did you not? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, unmistakably with no trace of feeling.

  “Oh, pity us poor women,” she cried out loud, delighted, thinking this would have taught Rose, if the woman could have been here to learn it. “D’you mean you can’t be certain?”

  “I thought I knew, dear. Then she went and married someone else,” he explained.

  “Yes, but you carried on seeing her, surely? You told me.”

  “I did.”

  “Well then?” she demanded.

  There was a pause.

  “She properly played you up, didn’t she,” Miss Whitmore made comment. But Charley was several sentences behind once more.

  “I didn’t trust her quite the same,” he brought out, with difficulty.

  “When was that?” she gleefully demanded.

  “After she married Jim.”

  “Trusting is different,” she announced.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But I seemed to need her more.”

  “You know a great deal more than I sometimes credit you with,” she admitted, soberly, sadly.

  “Was it the same with your husband?” he asked, greatly daring.

  “With Phil? Oh that’s all over, done now. And we didn’t have a kid. I shan’t forget him till the day I die, but he wouldn’t want me to go on to be an old maid.”

  “But you never would, would you? I mean you were married once?”

  “Well, of course,” she said with a happy laugh. “But if you live on long enough without a man, you go back to be a virgin.”

  This remark enormously excited him somehow.

  “You don’t,” he cried out.

  “Then what’s an old maid, then?” she wanted to know.

  He could not think what to say, so stayed silent.

  “Oh yes, you know all right,” she insisted. “And it’s not for me. No thank you. Besides, I want kids.”

  “Why do you?” He spoke loud.

  “Because they’re good for your health, if you’re a woman. But that’s not the real reason. I want to have them so as to love.”

  He was very nervous about where all this was leading. But he considered he had been let down so often, in his time, that he was not going to give himself away again just yet.

  “You could love the man you married?” he asked.

  “I don’t see it that way,” she replied. “You can’t get more out of anything than you put in. And kids are your own flesh and blood. A woman risks her life having them. There’s nothing more a girl can put into it than having her own children, doing everything for them, till they’re of an age to look after themselves, it’s her most.”

  “Not much of a look out for the husband, then,” he had the courage to say.

  “What d’you mean?” she asked. “What is there that’s wrong for him, in all I’ve just said? I don’t see life as sitting in another person’s lap, as you and your Rose seem to have done together, from what Mother tells me. It’s starting a home and working for it, that’s what I call it,” she said.

  “Did your Phil see things that way?”

  “You leave him out, Charley. He’s nothing to do with what we’re discussing.”

  They fell silent. They were getting near the village.

  He was really agitated. She could talk about Rose playing him up, yet she’d had a shot at the same game once or twice herself, or so it seemed. But then, of course, it was all his own fault, he felt. A wife and kids were not for Charley Summers. He knew that. He was too slow. He’d never find a woman to put up with him.

  “Then there’s Panzer,” she said suddenly, and, so it appeared, at a tangent, but, in actual practice, with a great deal of purpose. “I couldn’t leave her,” she pointed out.

  “You don’t have to,” he objected.

  “If I married,” she explained, and spoke as if talking to a child. “No,” she went on, “whoever took me to be his wedded wife, would have to take my cat on with me.”

  “Well, why not?” he asked, wondering.

  He became aware that she was watching him.

  “That’s all very fine, but Panzer’s one of those things I’d have to get straight right off,” she insisted. “Her future kittens as well, oh yes. I could never leave them behind.”

  He did not know what he was supposed to say. He was floundering.

  “Why sure,” he said. “But you’d leave Mrs Grant?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “There’s not room for two in my digs, and houses aren’t easy to come by these days. I’d stay on where I am now. She’d be glad to welcome my husband in her home.”

  “I thought she had a niece in Leicester,” he brought out.

  “And so she has, Charley, but she’s not sure of her welcome there. Oh we’ve had this out. She’d be quite agreeable.”

  “Well that makes it easier, certainly, with the cat and her kittens.”

  She accepted this. “There you are,” she said.

  They had almost come to the single village street, in which he had met Arthur Middlewitch during the August holiday, and through which he had so often strolled with Rose, after her marriage to Phillips. It was also where Ridley used to play with the Gubbins children. He did wonder for a moment whether they would run across the boy, but the little street was quite deserted. He supposed the locals were sleeping off their Christmas dinner. He was glad, because he did not want James to know that he was down. He was not going to have him getting in first with this girl, as Jim had done the last time. Then, absolutely without warning, stepping out of a surface shelter in the roadway, and not three paces from them, was Ridley, his eyes fixed on Nance. Afterwards, when Charley went over it in his mind, he thought he had never seen such pain on any face. For the boy had blushed, blushed a deep scarlet in this snow clear light. He must have thought he was seeing his mother step, in her true colours, out of his father’s microfilms. And Nance, who did not know him, passed him by.

  Charley managed to turn round, without attracting her attention, in order to make the child a sign. All he could think of, and he did not know why, was to put a finger to his lips. At that, Ridley turned, and ran off fast.

  Charley was so upset that he did not take in the sense of the words with which Nance th
en broke the silence that had fallen between them.

  “We could make a go of it between us, you know, if we tried,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You wouldn’t have heard, would you dear?” she said gently. “I was making a proposal.”

  He still did not trust his ears.

  “I didn’t quite catch,” he lied.

  She stopped in her tracks. She put her hands up to the lapels of his coat.

  “I was proposing, dear,” she said.

  He felt his heart beating so hard that he was afraid he would suffocate.

  “You really mean it?” he asked, and for the rest of his life, for the life of him, he could not remember anything of what passed during the remainder of that afternoon. It was bliss.

  So she had asked him to marry her, and had been accepted. She had made only one condition, which was that they should have a trial trip. So it was the same night, under Mr Mandrew’s roof, that he went to her room, for the first time in what was to be a happy married life.

  She was lying stark naked on the bed, a lamp with a pink shade at her side. She had not drawn the blackout, and the electric light made the dark outside a marvellous deep blue. In an attempt to seem natural, he said something about showing a light.

  “Come here, silly,” was what she replied.

  Then he knelt by the bed, having under his eyes the great, the overwhelming sight of the woman he loved, for the first time without her clothes. And because the lamp was lit, the pink shade seemed to spill a light of roses over her in all their summer colours, her hands that lay along her legs were red, her stomach gold, her breasts the colour of cream roses, and her neck white roses for the bride. She had shut her eyes to let him have his fill, but it was too much, for he burst into tears again, he buried his face in her side just below the ribs, and bawled like a child. “Rose,” he called out, not knowing he did so, “Rose.”

  “There,” Nancy said, “there,” pressed his head with her hands. His tears wetted her. The salt water ran down between her legs. And she knew what she had taken on. It was no more or less, really, than she had expected.

  NOTES

  1Horizon, 15 (1947), p 75.

  2 Another favourable critic was Marie Scott-James in Time and Tide, 30 November 1946, p 1161, who praised the book’s “curious and arresting blend of the lyrical and the realistic” and claimed that “no other living novelist has caught the contemporary idiom so well”.

  3Spectator, 29 November 1946, p 590. In the New Statesman, Reyner Heppenstall went further: “Mr. Green’s readers are entitled to sulk …. The hallucinations in Back depend upon two low-grade coincidences, a likeness between half-sisters and the fact that the name Rose occurs in the past tense of a common verb. Out of this confusion arises no unperplexing ecstasy …” (23 November 1946, p 386).

  4 Henry Green, Pack My Bag, 1940, pp 66–7.

  5 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, 1985, p 194.

  6Concluding, Harvill edn. (1997) p 46.

  7 James Lees-Milne, Fourteen Friends, 1996, p 123.

  8 Matthew Yorke, ed., Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, 1992, p 115. It seems from a letter to Evelyn Waugh (11 November 1946: Yorke Archive) that Green did not know that the book – written by a M. de Courchamps – was a fabrication.

  9 Information from Alice Keene.

  10 Letter to Nancy Mitford, 27 November 1946. Waugh said much the same to Green himself in a letter dated 8 November 1946 (Yorke Archive), but more diplomatically.

  11 For example Rod Mengham in The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green, 1982, pp 173–4.

  12 Marie Scott-James, for example (see note 2), who said of “the beautiful opening passage which is poetry rather than prose” that “One is reminded of T.S. Eliot by the abrupt transitions from the sublime to the ridiculous and their purpose is the same.”

  13 Letter from Lehmann to Green dated 5 October 1944, now at Austin, Texas. Lehmann said, though, that the Hogarth Press might have been interested in a book-length translation from the Souvenirs.

  14 Henry Green to John Lehmann, 6 September 1945. (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas.)

  15 Henry Green to Rosamond Lehmann, 14 March 1945 (Library of King’s College, Cambridge).

  16 John Lehmann to Henry Green, 19 September 1945 (Princeton University Library).

  17Paris Review interview reprinted in Surviving (see note 8), p 244.

  18 See note 5.

  19 John Russell, Henry Green: Nine novels and an unpacked bag, 1960, p 169.

  20 Evelyn Waugh to Henry Green, 8 November 1946 (Yorke Archive).

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  First published by The Hogarth Press, 1946

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