Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  ‘He treats me as if I was a Fallen Woman or something.

  He goes on and on as if he’d rescued me from a life of vice. Well – I’ll tell you something. I’m beginning to wish he had – then it would be worth it. At least I’d have had something. I wish I’d been his mistress. I wish I was having his baby. That would serve Daddy right – if I had a black baby.’

  ‘My dear child, any baby would be a disadvantage.’

  She started to cry. I pictured her, lying on her stomach on the bed and weeping noisily into the telephone receiver. What would she be wearing? A blouse and skirt? A gown, all nylon and lace? A little to my regret, the idle speculation produced no flicker of sexual interest. Her pathetic, declared passion had had the effect of reducing her, irrevocably, to childhood. I felt sorry for her, irritated with her and angry with Reggie. Surely to God, he could have handled her better than this?

  She said, dolefully sniffing, ‘When you see Jay, Uncle Tom, will you tell him one thing for me?’

  ‘It depends what it is.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. It’s nothing embarrassing. It’s just that I’ve been thinking things over and I’ve decided I’m going to be a nurse. He thought it was a good idea. He didn’t think I was frivolous and silly and stupid and not able to stick to anything.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ I said gently. ‘You know, I don’t think you’re silly and frivolous, either.…’

  She said, with cold dignity, ‘I don’t care what you think any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was a pause. Then she said in a small, distant voice, ‘I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘I don’t mind if it makes you feel better.’

  ‘It doesn’t really. I’ve been monstrously rude to Daddy and it hasn’t helped. I don’t blame him for making me come home, I mean it was mad, but I suppose I can understand that. It’s all the other things – the things he says. About people just down from the trees, you know. Of course he’s absolutely bonkers, I mean he’s stark raving, you should hear him. You don’t know what it’s been like here, Uncle Tom.’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘It makes you feel – oh, I don’t know. As if you want to go and be a missionary or work in a leper colony. Or – or rush out into the street and throw your arms round every black man you see and say I’m sorry for being a white person.’

  ‘That’s not an impulse I should give way to, if I were you. It would hardly help your personal situation.’

  ‘Don’t laugh.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I think I do know how you feel.’

  ‘It makes you feel so – dirty.’

  ‘I know it,’ I said.

  Louise said, ‘Julia’s coming round this evening.’ She looked at me with an odd gleam in her eye. ‘She went to see Philip on Sunday.’

  ‘That was nice of her. What made her do that?’

  ‘I gather she was feeling bad about Jay. Reparations or something.’

  ‘Nothing wrong in that.’ I stopped. ‘Oh! Oh, my God.’

  Louise gave a deep sigh. ‘So you did know Georgie was going. Mother said.…’ She speared a potato. ‘It might help, Tom, if – just occasionally – you told me what you’d been up to.’

  ‘I just didn’t think. Oh, my God.’

  She said, with asperity, ‘For heaven’s sake don’t sit there gaping. Like one of your wretched fish deprived of oxygen or something.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I closed my mouth. ‘What happened?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘She didn’t say much. Only that they’d met there.’

  ‘Augustus?’ I said, horrified.

  She shook her head. ‘Luckily, no.’ Suddenly, she giggled. ‘It must have been rather funny, really.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ I said.

  ‘It was rather ridiculous,’ Julia said. ‘I didn’t realize at first who she was. As a matter of fact, I thought she must be some kind of official – something to do with the British Council, perhaps. One of those deedy women. Then Philip called her Aunty Georgie.…’

  ‘What did you say?’ Louise asked.

  ‘I can’t really remember, dear. Something like, “I’m afraid we haven’t met.…” She was wearing an awful old coat – like a mangy yak – and a sort of pudding basin with felt violets on it, and the most extraordinary shoes.’

  ‘That sounds like Aunty,’ Louise said.

  ‘I would have thought Augustus would have had better taste.’

  They both laughed, loudly. Then there was silence. It was very uncomfortable, like an amateur stage show in which everyone has forgotten their lines.

  Louise cleared her throat. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Do? What could we do? We both took him out to tea – after all, I couldn’t take him and leave her standing there, could I? We had a very nice tea in the hotel. It was raining, so afterwards we played snakes and ladders. She had brought snakes and ladders with her.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy, it must have been so funny.’ Louise laughed till the tears came.

  ‘It was hilarious,’ Julia said.

  ‘What did you call each other, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘We called each other by our first names. Anything else would have been too embarrassing.’ Julia’s skin was stretched tautly over her bones. Her face looked like an old mask that had been dried out in the sun.

  ‘I suppose it would,’ Louise said. ‘Will you have sugar, Mrs Trim? No, thank you, Mrs Trim.’

  Her face was suffused, her eyes streaming. I could have shaken her till her teeth rattled.

  ‘The situation was ludicrous,’ Julia said. ‘Two old women. Old women should not have emotions.’

  ‘Neither of you are old,’ Louise said. She got up and offered her mother a cigarette.

  Julia took one from the box and put it between her lips without using her filter.

  Louise lit it for her.

  Then she said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mum?’

  ‘If you’d like to make one, dear.’

  Louise jerked the door open too quickly and banged her forehead. She gave a startled cry and burst into tears. Julia and I got up at once and went towards her but she backed away, scarlet.

  ‘It’s all right, don’t fuss. I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.’

  She gasped, and galloped into the kitchen.

  Julia looked at me uncertainly, ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Her mouth tightened as if it had been jerked taut by a piece of string.

  ‘Do you think I should divorce Augustus?’

  ‘Because you’ve met Georgie? No, I—’

  ‘Not altogether. I mean, not just for her sake.’ She gave me a nervous look. ‘I was so ashamed,’ she said. ‘More ashamed than ever in my life. It was as if I’d suddenly come face to face with myself and seen someone quite different. A silly, vindictive, old woman.’

  ‘You’re not vindictive.’

  ‘No. Just thoughtless. I’d never thought before. Not of her. As a person, I mean. She was just Augustus’s bit. I can’t think why Augustus didn’t tell me the sort of person she was. Perhaps I wouldn’t have listened, though. Perhaps she was different then.’ She looked at me hopefully. ‘Was she ever pretty, do you think?’

  ‘I should think she probably was,’ I lied. ‘She was a skating star.’

  She let out her breath slowly. The lines on her face plumped out and she looked younger. ‘Augustus never could resist a pretty face. It wasn’t sex, though. That’s what surprised me, when he went off. I couldn’t believe – I mean it was only through perseverance that Reggie and Louise.…’ She stopped and then said in a suddenly loud voice, ‘Just like posting a marshmallow in a letter-box.’ She looked at me slyly. ‘Have I embarrassed you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, I’ve embarrassed myself. I never thought I’d say that to anyone.’ She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette; her fingers were trembling. ‘I used to long to say it to Augustus. Oh – the nights
I lay awake, saying spiteful, vulgar things aloud, in the dark! For years after he left.…’

  Her colour rose vividly. ‘I’m a disgusting old woman, Tom. And spiteful, as I said. I hated him for what he’d done, to me and to the children – Reggie particularly. Reggie was a disappointment to him. He wasn’t a particularly attractive little boy, too fat, bad at games and generally clumsy. Augustus tried not to show how he felt, he wasn’t cruel, but children know.… I can remember Reggie standing in the garden of the house we had in Ealing, watching his father play with Louise. He was so different with her. I can remember Reggie standing there – I was weeding the rose-bed. After a bit he went indoors and up to his room. When I went after him, he’d locked the door. I used to think of that after Augustus had gone. That and the other things – all the things you remember afterwards. Once a marriage is over. I couldn’t really believe it was over, though. We hadn’t been altogether happy and that was partly my fault. I was quarrelsome. Miss Spit-and-Scratch, my mother used to call me. Once, after I was married, she said, “my girl, if you don’t learn to guard your tongue you’ll be sorry one day.” But I enjoyed fighting with Augustus, he was so prim, such an old stodge.… I couldn’t really believe he’d gone. I thought he’d walk in one day and it would be different, we’d both change. Of course, I gave that up, I’m not quite mad, but I couldn’t – I couldn’t quite shut the door. Even that must sound mad from an old woman after twenty-five years. But years go by faster than you think. You look in your mirror and you don’t notice much difference, it’s only other people who change. And they don’t change if you don’t see them. I’d always thought of her – and Augustus – as young. It was just a temporary infatuation between two young people. So when I saw her, it was a shock. I thought, why she’s old. And he’s old and I’m old. And suddenly it seemed terrible – all those wasted years of anger.’

  ‘And love,’ I said, with a sudden, suffocating feeling of pity.

  She looked deeply embarrassed. ‘Don’t be sorry for me, Tom, that would be the last straw,’ she said with strained brightness and then, more naturally – more in the tone in which she had been speaking, ‘But of course I can’t divorce him now. It wouldn’t do anyone any good. I expect everyone where they live thinks they’re married. And it’s not as if they’d had children. I only thought of it because I wanted to make amends. That was childish.’

  ‘Human.’

  ‘All right. But it’s human, too, to hate the idea that some things are done.’ She closed her eyes briefly as if to shut out some painful image. ‘Perhaps if I’d seen her, in the beginning, it might have made a difference. Though it shouldn’t have done. I should have had enough imagination.’

  ‘No one ever has about people they don’t know.’

  ‘Or about people they do know, either,’ she said. Her eyes sparked suddenly, with a return of her old fighting spirit. ‘You’ve never had any about poor Reggie, for example.’

  ‘Poor Reggie?’ Louise said, coming in with the tea tray. Her face was tear-stained and pale with the pity Julia would have shrunk from, had it been offered. Knowing this, even while she wept for her mother in the kitchen, had made Louise truculent. ‘How can you say poor Reggie? After the way he behaved to Jay?’

  Julia drew in her breath. She held it for a moment, then expelled a deep, martyred sigh. ‘I’m not going to quarrel with you about that,’ she remarked mildly, adding, at once, ‘I only think that you might, just occasionally, allow your charity to begin at home.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The coffee-bar was crowded with students. There was a smell of scalded milk and damp clothes. Through a hole someone had rubbed in the steam of the window you could see the snow falling lazily and insubstantially like torn up flakes of Kleenex. The girl at my table had pale cheeks and a pink nose and dry lips painted an unbecoming shade of brown; she wore a transparent nylon blouse that showed at least six shoulder straps and she was reading Benham’s Economics. Or pretending to read it; all the time I had been sitting there, she had not turned a page. There was an empty coffee-cup stained with the brown lipstick on the table in front of her and an open notebook with doodles in the margins; child-like houses, each with four windows and a door and a chimney-pot with squiggles of smoke rising from it. Every time the door of the bar opened, she looked up hopefully.

  At the next table, like a deliberate demonstration of the unfairness of life, another girl was holding court. She wasn’t beautiful – her skin was spotty – but she thought she was or the four young men who surrounded her had made her feel she was. At any rate, she glowed warmly with confident self-absorption, smiling inscrutably or gaily as the occasion demanded, fingering her hair, brightening her eyes with assumed interest in the young men’s conversation when for the moment it turned away from her. One strand of hair hung, apparently carelessly, down the side of her marred young cheek. From time to time, my girl watched her with an expression of puzzled incomprehension. Once, she glanced into the peach-tinted mirror that covered one wall of the coffee-bar and tugged furtively at a length of her own hair so that it fell loose, in imitation. The effect was clearly quite different; she blushed with ashamed disillusion before she turned back to Benham. But she was young, hope had not yet been deferred long enough to defeat her; the next time the door opened she looked up with bright, renewed eagerness and the beginnings of a smile that made her look almost pretty.

  A young Indian, with fine features and a delicate air, came in. The girl’s smile trembled slightly, then grew broad and artificial. The Indian nodded at her and she waved at him gaily. This was not the one she was waiting for, but he would do. He could protect her at least from the humiliation of sitting alone, unwanted. But the Indian only smiled in a polite and distant way and sat down on a high stool at the bar. The girl looked for a moment at his neat, well-dressed back before she bent over Benham, her cheeks, sagging in little pouches, crimson with her shame.

  Up to now, watching her, I had not realized how long I had been waiting for Jay – I had reckoned to have to wait for him, after all. Now, looking at my watch, I saw he was over an hour late. Of course he might be busy but surely, in that case, he would have answered my letter and said so? I had given him time.… The cogs of self-doubt started turning. Why had I written to suggest this meeting anyway? His earlier letter, though perfectly dignified and friendly, had made it clear that he did not wish to see us at the moment. So why should I try to force myself on him? And what answer could he make, except silence? I looked at the girl. She was strapping her books together, a leaden look on her face. She had given up. She knew now that he wouldn’t come. Her misery was like a statement of my own rejection.

  Suddenly I wanted to leave at once. A stupid panic came over me – a panic that I could trace right back. ‘Never push yourself in where you’re not wanted’, my mother used to say, a remarkably ungracious injunction based, not on tact, but on pride and on fear of rebuff that had nevertheless had its effect: I was terrified, now, that Jay would come late to his usual coffee-bar, thinking he had avoided me, and find me still sitting there.

  I blundered into someone at the door.

  ‘Why, it is Mr Grant,’ Thomas Okapi said.

  He was wearing a morning-suit with an enormous pink carnation in the button-hole. He was smoking a long cigar.

  ‘I have been officiating at a wedding,’ he explained. ‘I have been Best Man. I fear we were celebrating so cheerfully that I forgot the time.’

  What time, I wondered? A look of fuddled puzzlement spread over his face as if he were wondering too. He breathed stalely into my face. ‘I was very sorry to hear, Mr Grant, that our mutual friend had left your premises. I must tell you that I have been working my fingers to the bone to find a new lodger for you, but I am afraid there has been some difficulty. Your office gave me the wrong telephone number.’

  ‘Yes. I heard. But I’m not—’

  He wagged his great head at me solemnly, ash flying from his cigar. ‘I am deeply sorry if inconvenien
ce has been caused. But now I have met you I can tell you that with luck I shall shortly be able to find you some pleasant person—’

  ‘I don’t want—’

  ‘Unfortunately I am not myself available or I am sure we would find great delight in each other’s company. But I am very nicely fixed. I have an extremely pleasant flat in a select district with an excellent prospect from the bedroom window.’

  I said loudly, ‘I’m very glad, Mr Okapi. But I’m afraid your efforts have been wasted. We don’t want a lodger. Jay was a friend – a guest.’

  ‘That is a great pity,’ he said sternly. ‘We are in great need of liberal-minded families in London. There are not enough to go round.’

  What did he mean? Wild images chased through my mind – an underground, cannibal society, starved of liberal flesh?

  He said, ‘All the same, it is fortunate we have met. I should have been here much earlier to bring you a message from our friend. He much regrets he cannot meet with you but he is indisposed.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He shrugged his vast shoulders. ‘Some minor infection, nothing serious, I pray to God. You will doubtless discover the extent of his illness when you visit him.’

  ‘I haven’t got his address,’ I said.

  The street was long, a narrow brick canyon which could admit little light, even in summer. Here, on this grey London afternoon – the sky was dull pewter with snow – it seemed perceptibly darker than the day elsewhere. It was quiet, the only signs of life a small dog rootling among some refuse in the gutter, a rosy baby rocking in a pram. No shops, only a café exuding a rich smell of cooking oil and a seedy pub. The terraced houses were shabby but respectable, in the way my mother would have understood the word: the steps leading up to the front doors were swept, the windows clean.

  Jay’s house was half-way down the road, distinguished from its neighbours only by a window-box of dead geraniums. An iron door-knocker raised subterranean echoes. I waited. Through the frosted glass panels a head loomed, child-high.

  But it wasn’t a child. The opening door disclosed a face that was wrinkled and brown as an old russet apple. She was wearing a high-necked, black wool dress and high-heeled shoes on tiny, puffy feet. She said at once – presumably she was used to taking the initiative with strangers – ‘Whom did you wish to see?’ Her voice was surprisingly deep and she spoke precisely, like a foreigner.