“When we got married,” Vera said to Eve who had started her salad, “we were introduced to suitable people. Things have changed since the war. Standards, I mean. Victor and Vanessa meet all kinds of odd people and one can’t really stop them. They don’t seem able to discriminate.”
“I don’t think they want to. I’m sure Vanessa will be all right. Clifford is probably a passing phase and you’re worrying for nothing,” Eve said comfortably. Neither of them liked talking about anything other than themselves or their own families for long. Vanessa was Vera’s worry. As long as she was invited to the wedding she wasn’t going to give the matter too much thought. Besides, just now she had some news to impart.
“You know that man I went to see,” she said, leaning confidentially over the table towards Vera; “the Second Opinion?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he says there’s no question about it, I’ve got to have it out.”
Vera tut-tutted sympathetically, feeling no pain.
“The lot! It’s one of the worst cases he’s seen. A major operation!”
“You poor dear. When?” Vera said, wondering whether she should bother to complain about the greenfly she had found in her salad.
“Well, he’s going away for two months, so when he comes back…”
“Couldn’t someone else do it?”
“My dear, there’s not another man in London. He does the Royal Family.”
“How long will you be in?” There was another greenfly.
“Weeks. And after that I shall have to take it very easy for a long while.” Eve, who never took it anything but easy, looked sorry for herself. “Of course, I shall go away afterwards,” she said, but Vera wasn’t listening.
“Waitress,” she said, holding her plate, “will you kindly take this back to the kitchen…”
The London afternoon was smouldering, but although her feet bulged more and more over her shoes Vera did not care. From the sun-sparkled windows she chose a hat, a lampshade for the flat, an Alice-band in mother-of-pearl for Vanessa. Her last hour and a half she spent relaxed in the muffled, scented luxury of the hairdressers. Closing her eyes beneath the dryer, she let the glossy magazine they had given her slip to the floor and dreamed about the party she would give when Arthur gave up his foolish idea and they returned to town. She arrived back at Whitecliffs on the fast train with all the business men. As they walked towards the sleepy-eyed ticket collector in their dull black hats, evening papers beneath their arms, they breathed the fresh air which seeped up the High Street from the sea and smiled. Vera adjusted her parcels and looked for Arthur. He was outside in the cobbled yard with the car. The seat was almost too hot to sit on.
“Had a nice day, dear?” he said affably.
“Wonderful. What about you?” Both enquiries were polite, mechanical.
“Not too bad. We ran out of strawberry and the last lot of buckets had faulty handles. The kids have been bringing them back all day.”
Vera closed her eyes, only partly in weariness, she thought. Buckets with Mickey Mouses on and strawberry ice-cream!
“Arthur, dear,” she said.
“Mm?”
She wanted to ask him if he hadn’t had enough of foolishness, of Whitecliffs, of playing at cafés. If he didn’t think he should be getting back to his business. It had been a long, tiring day. She did not want to start an argument.
“Nothing, it doesn’t matter.”
He took his eyes from the road for a moment and smiled at her. She was surprised to see how brown he had got, his eyes were clear and his face seemed less lined, to bear an imprint of another Arthur Dexter; a young man, half remembered.
Vera felt a sudden surge of affection. “I bought you some cheese from Fortnum’s,” she said. “‘Tombe de Savoie’.”
“Good,” Arthur said; “that’s one thing I miss down here.”
Ten
When Vera, changed into more comfortable shoes and an expensive silk dress, came into Vanessa’s room to give her the Alice-band she found her daughter, in her underwear, of which there was not very much, standing on her head, her feet supported by the wall, her eyes closed. The odd, off-beat sounds of some unintelligible song moaned from the radio by the bed. From the walls some two hundred and fifty young men, glossy, showing their teeth, most of them pop singers, looked down. Some of them had signed their names across their chins. On the chair, on the dressing-table, on the bed and on the floor were items of Vanessa’s clothing. Vera sighed.
“Vanessa!”
Vanessa’s eyes opened. “You spoiled my concentration.”
Vera lowered the radio from which a young man was threatening to ‘getta noo baa-aa-beee’. “How can you concentrate with this row going on?”
“I was diverting my senses from the external world and breathing through my fingertips. Yoga,” Vanessa said. “You’d be surprised how difficult it is.”
“I can quite believe it,” Vera said and, picking up one or two of the garments scattered about, tried to straighten the bed-cover. “Are you tired? You mustn’t let Daddy keep you standing there all day with that wretched candy-floss, you aren’t used to it.”
“I’m not a bit tired. I love it. It’s such a change from school. I love to watch the children’s faces as I twirl it on to the stick. I can almost hear them begging me not to stop. I try to be fair, but sometimes it’s difficult.” Vanessa closed her eyes. And I love the feel, she said to herself, of knowing that Howard is there behind me. That I have only to look round to see his solemn face, wise, yet sad somehow, the hair greying above the ears, the hands, beautiful, serving ice-cream cornets. Perhaps one day he will know that I exist.
“I bought you something in town,” Vera said.
Vanessa opened her eyes again. “Thank you, Mummy. What is it?”
“If you could stand the right way up for a moment, I’d show you.”
Vanessa sighed and let her legs drop to the carpet. “Phew!” She looked at the clock by the bed and turned the radio up again. “Seventeen and a half minutes! Not bad.”
She took the Alice-band, kissed her mother dutifully, and tried it on.
Vera, looking at her, wished she was eighteen again with a tiny, firm bottom and a bust that wore a brassière only as a token rather than a necessity. She ran her hands over her firmly corseted figure, and wondered when the insidious spread had begun, and the loose skin beneath her chin and the lines round the eyes. I, too, once looked like you, she wanted to confide, but she knew that Vanessa, uninterested, would say, Yes, politely, unable to imagine it, probably not even believing. At eighteen one did not believe one could grow old.
Vanessa was prattling about the Alice-band, and saying that she would wear her new pink cotton tonight, and that being in the café hadn’t really given her a chance to get tanned.
Vera pointed to a letter on the dressing-table. “From Clifford?” she said.
Vanessa, her hands adjusting the Alice-band, became completely still. Her face, which a moment before had been open, laughing, closed down, blank, guarded.
“Yes. It’s from Cliff.” She reached for her cotton robe from the chair and tied it firmly round her. She turned the radio off, her mood no longer rocking and rolling, and, choosing one from her dozen bottles of nail-varnish, sat on the dressing-stool.
“How’s he getting on with his exams?”
“All right.”
“Of course, it will be years before he qualifies, won’t it?”
“Years and years.”
“So it’s silly to think about marrying Cliff.”
Vanessa looked up from the nail she was varnishing. “Who said anything about marrying Cliff? You are funny, Mummy, just because a boy happens to write to me. Lots of boys write to me. It would be jolly funny if every time a boy wrote to me you thought…”
But Vanessa, Clifford writes twice a day, Vera wanted to say, sometimes Express post. He telephones, too. You wait for his letters, a look comes into your eyes. I am a woman, your mother, wh
y can’t we talk? I would understand. I understood your cries as a baby, your first words, your tears when you went to school, your bewilderment at womanhood, your pride when you passed your exams. Why have I suddenly become acceptable only for small, meaningless talk, for buying your clothes and entertaining your friends?
“I only wanted to tell you – warn you,” Vera said, “before you get too keen on him. I mean one has to have something to get married on, however little, and you’re used to every comfort…”
“But nobody’s mentioned marriage. Cliff’s a friend…”
“I know, I know. I’m only trying to say… You know quite well what I’m trying to say… Why do you pretend? I was young once.” Now she had said it and she hadn’t meant to. It sounded stupid, pathetic, a plea for sympathy; it widened the gap she was trying to close.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I ordered the material for your chair,” Vera said, “a kind of wallflower pink to tone with the bed-head. The man’s coming next week. Would you like it box-pleated or tailored?”
“Whatever you like,” Vanessa said, but she was smiling again having stepped on to safe, familiar ground, the only place where they could meet each other.
“I think perhaps box-pleats, it’s daintier for a young girl’s room.”
After dinner Vanessa walked out into the evening which was still warm and light. With a white stole over her pink dress she strolled over the green above the beach towards the lighthouse. She knew where she was going, although she hadn’t admitted it to herself. Each night, from her bedroom window, she had watched Howard, book in hand, walk purposefully along the green in the direction she was now going. After about an hour she would see him stride back, smoking his pipe, through the dusk. The grass soft beneath her sandalled feet, Vanessa tried to analyse her feelings for Cliff, and reconcile them with how she felt about Howard. For two months since she had met him at a dance, she had seen Cliff practically every day. With growing wonder they had discovered they liked the same things, thought the same thoughts, were happy only when they were together. Then she had come away, firmly believing that without seeing Cliff every day, without kissing him, touching him, walking beside the tall, thin figure in the old favourite sports jacket and with the unruly blond hair that was almost white, she would be unable to live. Each time she closed her eyes she could see his clear face, his smiling mouth and the eyes that looked so deeply into her own. Then she had met Howard. He had arrived in Whitecliffs after most of the others, and had rung the Dexter’s doorbell late one night in order to get the keys to his flat. Vanessa had opened the door. He was tall and heavily built, wore his City black jacket and striped trousers and looked tired, blinking like a child; his face was stubbled with the end-of-the-day’s darkness but his shirt was still impeccable. He had introduced himself, and Vanessa had fetched the keys from her father who was already in bed. He had thanked her solemnly and gone. A moment or two later he was back.
“I suppose you haven’t any milk?” he said. “I’m frightfully sorry to trouble you but I hadn’t expected to be down until the morning. My case finished sooner than I anticipated.”
“If you’d like to come in, I’ll make you something,” Vanessa said, “a sandwich and some coffee.”
“I dined before I left town,” Howard said. “If you just have some milk. I generally take a glass before I retire.”
She’d watched him, the milk bottle incongruous with his black jacket, go back to his flat. When she shut the door she knew she was in love with him. But what of Cliff? Cliff who thought the same, talked the same, knew her almost better than she knew herself? He hadn’t changed. His letters were wonderful and full of love. She hadn’t changed either, she wrote back that she loved him, too. She did. But, as the weeks progressed, she had forgotten what it felt like in his arms, how he looked when he smiled, the near delight of him. She was writing to nothing, and when she shut her eyes she saw Howard with his sad, kind face, the chin growing heavy, the deep forehead, the greying hair. Particularly, she liked the back of his neck which was all she usually saw of him when she turned round from her candy-floss. She could not understand her own emotions, or whether it was possible to love two people at the same time. She walked faster along the green searching for Howard who would be shattered if he could look into her heart.
She found him sitting in a shelter, facing the sea. He was smoking a pipe and reading his book, and was wearing a cloth cap against the evening breeze. She thought it made him more good-looking than ever. Like a country squire in a way.
She sat down next to him. “What are you reading?”
“Good evening, Vanessa. I didn’t see you coming.”
“You were too busy with your book. What is it?”
“Joad’s Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics.”
“Oh!” There seemed nothing else to say.
“It’s getting too dark to read. I generally stay here for about an hour. I like the soothing sound of the sea. Do you believe that the universe is ethically neutral?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“That the universe itself contains no principles to guide our conduct, no Being to watch over our endeavours, no goals to reward our efforts. That it’s all the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”
“I believe in God, if that’s what you mean.”
“How old are you, Vanessa?”
“Eighteen.”
“I’m forty-three. I wish it were so simple.”
“Why do you worry so?”
“Because I must. I believe we are here for a purpose, but I have to convince myself. Socrates, Plato, Kant, the more one reads the worse it becomes.” He looked out into the deepening sea as if the answer he sought would come floating to the surface.
“Don’t you ever relax?” Vanessa said, watching his well kept hand round the bowl of his pipe. “Go to the pictures or dance, or anything like that?”
“I told you. I’m forty-three.”
“Well, you aren’t married or anything. It doesn’t do to get too stuffy.”
He turned sharply to look at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean exactly that, only…well …you don’t seem to enjoy life. You make it all so serious.”
“It is, Vanessa. What are we here for? What do we mean? What happens when we’re dead? What have we learned from civilization? Why must we all learn afresh?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. Why have you never married? Did you have an unhappy love-affair? Or is it because all the divorces you do put you off?”
“Neither of those things. I just haven’t.” He did not say that he had been waiting for his dream to materialise.
“I went to a divorce court once. It was horrible. I didn’t know that you could just walk in like going to the pictures, only this was free; then someone told me that you could, and I went. It was a couple, not very old, and they had one child they were squabbling over. It was a year old, they said, and I could imagine it, all golden curls and dimples, and at ten-thirty one winter’s morning it became ‘legal custody’, the ‘child of this association’, the pawn moved to and fro. And the parents, how happily they must have started, all dressed up, and the wedding dress, and the church, and the orange blossom and confetti; and then suddenly their hopes and cares and dreams dragged out on to the muddy carpet one cold morning by some soulless barrister who, in the middle of messing up a life or possibly two, loses his papers, his glasses, his gown from his shoulders and his train of thought. And the Judge, wanting his lunch, and the private enquiry agent with his frayed suit and beady eyes, and his pocket full of pens and pencils in case he missed something. And the woman having to speak up and everyone laughing and sniggering at what should be private and sacred…”
“In all probability,” Howard said, sucking calmly at his pipe, “there was no white wedding, no orange blossom and no confetti. A hurried and necessary marriage in a registry office; a room with the in-laws,
a shared kitchen, an indolent, alcoholic husband, a nagging, shrewish wife and the baby a snivelling bundle of wet nappies. But then I’m not, as I told you, eighteen. And hanging round the divorce courts, if you’ve no objection to my saying so, is no pastime for you.”
“I wasn’t hanging. I just went out of interest. And I wondered if it was that which had put you off getting married.”
It was almost dark. “No, it was not that,” Howard said. He could not explain that he had been waiting for something that could never happen.
“How do you like serving ice-cream? It must seem strange after acting about in your wig and gown.”
“We don’t act about, as you put it. And I like doing the ice-creams. It gives me time to think.”
“What do you think about?” She took the book from his lap and flicked over the pages. “I’ll tell you. Objective intuitionism, objective utilitarianism, society, its nature and origin, the theory of democracy.”
“And other things,” Howard said. He did not know she was laughing at him.
“What other things?”
“I don’t know. Legal Aid, the Rent Act, my chambers, I need a new carpet…”
“And those things are actually going through your mind as you hand out strawberry and vanillas?”
“Why not?”
Vanessa handed him his book. “I believe you are beyond redemption,” she said, standing up. “I’m going to walk back; it’s getting cold.”
He stood up, as she had hoped he would, and fell into step beside her along the grass which was now almost black. He put his hands in his pockets and stooped forward slightly, his stride long and regular.
“What do you do on your afternoon off?” Vanessa asked when they had walked almost half a mile in silence. Arthur allowed them all one free afternoon a week.
“Anything. I went to Richborough Castle last week. Of course, there’s very little now remaining, but it was quite fascinating. Occupied about the third century BC. Some outstanding excavations in the Museum there; Samian pottery, Kimmeridge shale from Dorset, jet from Whitby, Anglo-Saxon sceattas of the late seventh century – of course, there’s a break of more than two centuries in the archaeological record at Richborough…”
We All Fall Down Page 10