by MARY HOCKING
‘Voluntary fireman?’
They both laughed, but without much zest. She said, ‘I don’t want just the part that’s left over from your working life.’
‘So what is the trouble?’
‘We haven’t heard what you want, have we?’
He seemed not to have imagined that he might be required to give account of himself. After several moments’ silence, during which, judging by his expression, he might have been contemplating a disabling operation, she said, ‘You must admit that we don’t seem to have a great deal in common – unless you feel the need of an injection of good yeoman blood!’
He looked at her, surprised and appreciative, with that hint of relish which had shaken her once before. She felt as if, all unknowing, he had touched a secret spring and revealed things hidden away whose existence she, their possessor, had long forgotten; like the Christmas gifts of trinkets which were too ‘fancy’, their shiny brightness raising doubts as to what possible use they might be put to. And no respectable answer presenting itself, they must be put out of sight; the fact of their being gifts saving them from the waste bin, since gifts must not be thrown away, only buried.
What audacity is it you have uncovered in me? she wondered, while Austin addressed himself to more prosaic questions, under the impression that this was what was required of him.
‘I suppose I have overworked – like a lot of older people, left to hold a business together while the young rattle around saving the world. Added to that, my emotional life has been dead for a long time.’ Oh dear, oh dear! she thought, having brought him to this, and not now seeing it as important. They were already joined in a measure which had no need of words. But the mind cannot be left out of this exercise entirely, and must be allowed to come to its own decision, even though the conclusion be known. So she set her mind to attend to him. ‘Things were getting quite bad at the beginning of last year. When I was with people, socially or otherwise, I didn’t contribute anything. I heard myself thanking my hostess for a delightful evening; telling my daughter it had been good to see her again; I sat at my desk trying to say something positive to an author who deserved encouragement, and sounding grudging. Nothing seemed good, delightful, or worthy of praise. Then, you got into that railway compartment, and something happened. I have no idea what. I didn’t think of you afterwards. But when I saw you again at Brighton station, I said to myself, “Here she comes!” as if I had been expecting you to arrive.’ There was a long pause, then he said rather unhappily, as though his lack of eloquence had convinced him it was a matter of no great significance, ‘I suppose you might say that I needed you.’
She felt depressed. She, too, had been through a distressing time. Her emotional life had been drained. Why should he assume that she was strong enough to meet his needs – comprising, as she understood it, restoration of the good life, delight, and the ability to think positively?
She looked round the room again, imagining that life here would definitely be too cerebral. How she would miss the shared jokes which she and Stanley had accumulated over the years; how long it would take for her and Austin to learn to accept each other’s weaknesses!
And her children! They came to her on a thread of laughter and tears, unbidden as voices carried briefly on the night air to the dreamer by the hearth – a haunting, whether of time past or future the awakened dreamer scarcely knows. Nor whose the pain.
‘Perhaps we should talk about this another time.’ Austin, too, seemed filled with sudden apprehension.
Such a melancholy sight he presented that one might imagine his last breath to have sighed out leaving a face all puckers and pleats, like a doll drained of its sawdust life. Oh, you men! Judith thought. What a good thing we women don’t leave our store cupboards in your keeping! And restored by the certainty of her own resourcefulness, she rose briskly to her feet. ‘Do you realize we haven’t eaten since lunchtime? No wonder we feel so dreary.’ They went into the kitchen. When the farmer came, she said, ‘Do you mind? I expect you are hungry, too. It was all rather terrifying, wasn’t it?’
‘You would have been even more terrified if you had heard what I heard,’ he answered. ‘They hadn’t cleared their attic, the wicked old dears.’
Austin said, ‘You mean it was full of the accumulated treasures of their thirty years together, the weight of which might have brought the ceiling down on us at any moment?’
Judith recalled, ‘We cleared our attic; but the ceiling came down just the same.’ She felt sad, but held back the tears, thinking, I mustn’t give way. It’s too late. Too late for that now.
The dance must take its course, and doubt was a part of the pattern. She would be troubled, and lie awake at night thinking of the children and asking herself whether she was doing the right thing; yet knowing that somewhere, not too far away, joy awaited her. The pain and doubt were only stepping stones by which she would find her way to it.
In the spring of 1945, Jacov Vaseyelin had the use of a flat in London, which belonged to a journalist friend who was covering the fighting in Germany. In a surprisingly short time, Jacov had moved from near-poverty to affluence. The flat was in a block of Victorian mansions in Westminster.
Louise could hear the voices in the street and the rumble of buses. These busy sounds added to the luxury of being abed in the afternoon. The curtains stirring in a light breeze, and the glint of sunlight on the beads she had tossed down on the dressing table, added to her pleasure. She raised her arms, stretching her body from the tips of her fingers to her toes. She felt well-disposed to all human kind, and could have embraced the whole world but for the delightful languor which had eased out the tensions of the past week. She lay contentedly looking up at the pattern of light on the ceiling, until appetite began to oust languor. She called to Jacov, ‘All I need is the smell of real coffee.’
He came to the doorway, shoulder hunched, one hand casually miming that in this respect alone, he was impotent to supply her need, ‘Brandy, perhaps?’
‘Ugh! Tea, then.’
It was cuttingly cold, as spring can be. There was no heating. When she got up she went into the bathroom to wash and then dressed quickly.
‘When the war is over, it’s going to take years to bring any warmth back into buildings like this,’ she complained. Immediately, Guy intruded into her mind. She had a picture of him, standing on the doorstep, arms outstretched. It would not be the whole world he would want to embrace, but his wife and family exclusively. She might have felt differently had she known that at this moment, he was drinking coffee in a café in Florence with Monica Ames.
Jacov was bending over the stove. She stood beside him, nuzzling her chin into his shoulder, ‘What have you got there? I’m ravenous.’
‘An omelette.’
She watched him prodding delicately with a fork. ‘You are more interested in food than in me.’
‘To make a good omelette, you must give it all your attention.’
She ran a finger down his spine. He said, ‘In a minute . . .’
He had always wanted her, but was not in love with her. She had no complaints about this, since she was not in love with him. They were old friends who had need of each other. Even ‘friend’ seemed to be claiming too much from Jacov, There was always a distance between him and other people. When he held her in his arms, Louise knew that there was a part of him which was totally disengaged. She sensed, however, that this was not of his choice, rather some kind of incapacity.
He plated the omelette with a flourish which would have been appreciated in the back row of the pit, ‘If you’re not careful,’ Louise told him, ‘you are going to become a performance.’
He kissed and fondled her, to demonstrate how well he performed, and then said, ‘Omelettes must be eaten hot.’
She ate slowly. Nothing must be hurried; so much of pleasure lay in the savouring. ‘You’re a remarkably good cook. I can’t think of anyone else who could do this with dried egg.’
‘I used to cook for
my mother and the twins after Anita died.’
‘How are the twins? Still in Canada?’
‘Yes. Praying they won’t be fully trained by the time the war ends.’
‘Do you miss them?’
This seemed to puzzle him. ‘I haven’t thought about it.’
‘Jacov! All that has happened to you, and you can say that! Your only remaining family, and they may not come back to England!’
‘They are very exclusive, the twins.’
‘Don’t you sometimes want to throw back your head and howl like an animal? I should.’
‘No.’ He looked apologetic, furtively helping himself to a further portion of omelette, leaving only a small piece for her. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘How do you feel when you are on stage, then? Is it tragedy which gets the most out of you?’
‘Goodness no! It’s comedy I enjoy.’
‘If it’s comedy you’re going to settle for, you had better stop over-acting. You can get away with belting out Shakespeare – there are lots of people who think that is rather good. But even they will begin to notice if you continue to play comedy like comic opera.’
This offended him. An attack on his character, he would have accepted meekly enough, but he expected praise for his acting. He said, ‘I get good notices.’
‘How much competition is there at this time?’
He leant forward and ran a hand down the inside of her thigh. ‘I will worry when the competition comes along.’ The gesture was made to deflect further criticism, but it put her on edge and spoilt the rest of their brief time together.
Even so, on her way home, her spirits were effervescent, and little tremors of laughter ran up and down her spine. His love- making was not ardent, but he never failed to stimulate her; teasing, but not malicious, he was an artful little monkey.
On the rare occasions when they could have a night together, there was an experience which she could share with him alone, a sharing of something outside themselves. This was when, after they had made love, they lay listening to music. Sometimes it would be Mozart; at others, Delius, Debussy, Schumann. Mostly, it was Mozart. They would lie quietly while the light in the room grew dim; and first the outlines of furniture dissolved, and then, as the city itself darkened, there was no window, and the material world was swallowed up in the music. As he lay beside her, Louise did not know whether Jacov enjoyed the music intellectually or dropped into it as a well. They never spoke of it afterwards. For her, this long descent into a darkness where there was only the deep throb of a cello or the sweet breath of a flute, was a return to that garden where God walked in the cool of the day.
After one such night in April, she went to collect the children, who had stayed with Aunt May. On arrival, she found her mother waiting for her. She went white with shock, imagining that there must be bad news of Guy. Aunt May said kindly, ‘It’s all right, dear. Nothing dreadful has happened.’
Surprisingly, Judith seemed too concerned with explaining her presence in London to notice her daughter’s discomfort. She had travelled by train with a man who lived in some village near by – Louise had seen his house once and she seemed to think she should remember it. ‘Red tiles . . .’ she was saying. ‘And a blue front door.’
‘Louise was afraid we had had bad news of Guy,’ Aunt May said. ‘She has been so worried about him since he was wounded, haven’t you, dear?’
‘How could she think that?’ Judith was irritated at being interrupted. ‘You would have sent for her, not me.’
Louise had told Aunt May that she was going to the theatre and staying the night with a friend; she had not given a name or telephone number. Fortunately, Aunt May was too flustered by having said the wrong thing to pursue the matter any further. The children were playing in the garden. They could hear James shouting instructions to Catherine.
‘Have they been good?’ Louise asked, feeling wretchedly guilty.
‘Yes, dear. James is very anxious to have a doggie.’ Aunt May did not usually speak like this, but uneasiness made her adopt the vocabulary of the child.
‘He knows he can’t have a dog until the war is over. It would be terrified of the gunfire.’
Aunt May offered to make tea. They sat in the kitchen, where they could keep an eye on the children. Judith said she was surprised that Louise could not remember the country house with the red tiles.
‘Why would I? Remember me? I’m Louise. Alice is the one of your daughters who imagines herself living in every period house she takes a fancy to.’
Judith coloured. The change of life affected her in this way, signalling heightened emotion unmistakably. She could feel her cheeks burning; colour spread from cheeks to neck. A light film of sweat broke out all over her face.
Aunt May said tactfully, ‘Have a little more milk, dear. It’s not good to drink anything so hot. I’m sure that is why people get ulcers.’
Louise was looking at her mother in astonishment. ‘Why are you in London?’
‘I’m going to do some shopping.’
‘There’s a war on. Even if there was anything in the shops, you wouldn’t have the coupons to buy it.’
‘I want to look round. And then, I’m having lunch with the man who lives in the house I’ve been talking about – there’s an orchard close by and . . .’
‘What is his name?’
Judith offered up her secret joy with some reluctance. ‘Austin Marriott.’
‘I see.’
Aunt May, bewildered and uncomfortable, gave a little laugh. ‘That’s a funny name, isn’t it? I mean, it sounds rather important . . .’
Judith said, ‘He’s a publisher,’ as if this explained the name.
‘Better than Joe Bloggs for a publisher, certainly.’
Aunt May looked anxiously from one to the other.
Judith said, ‘I had hoped you would be more reasonable about this.’
‘My goodness! You are really . . .’
‘Not at all,’ Judith interrupted sharply. ‘It’s just . . . a possibility.’
‘Do you like him?’
‘Really, Louise! How can you possibly imagine . . .’
‘Like him?’ Aunt May turned wounded eyes on Judith. ‘You can’t mean . . . it’s not possible! Why, Stanley . . .’
‘Stanley died over four years ago. May.’
‘It seems only yesterday to me.’
‘But not to me. I have had to live through every one of those days.’
‘Yes, yes, Judith. Don’t think I don’t realize how hard it must have been.’ It was apparent she had expected the hardness to last a lifetime.
‘All this drama is out of all proportion,’ Judith told them. ‘I merely mention to you a man I have become acquainted with, and before we know where we are . . .’
‘You didn’t merely mention him!’ Louise retorted. ‘You told us all about his house!
‘I had thought you might like to come out to lunch with us.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t. Is he single? He must be very odd indeed if he is.’
The extent of her daughter’s antagonism began to steady Judith. She reminded herself how long Guy had been away. It must be galling for a young woman, so deprived, to discover that her mother has been singularly – indeed, as Louise would no doubt see it – inappropriately blessed. She addressed herself to the business of introducing Austin.
‘He is a widower. He was very fond of his wife, but she died a long time ago.’ She smiled, remembering what Austin had said. ‘I adored her. But she was always right. It is very difficult to live with someone who is always right. I didn’t make a good fist of it.’
Louise, noting that smile, realized that her mother had already achieved intimacy of a kind with this man.
‘He lost a son at Dunkirk. And he has one married daughter, who will probably like this no more than you.’
Louise, calmer now that Austin Marriott began to have more substance, said, ‘You should have told me straight out, not kept on about red t
iles and a blue door.’
‘You won’t come out to lunch with us?’
‘I need time to get used to this first.’ She could not bear to be a witness to anyone’s happiness at this moment, let alone her mother’s. ‘Perhaps I could lunch with him some other time, if he works in London.’
Aunt May was crying, ‘Oh Stanley, Stanley!’ and Louise, thinking how they all betrayed him, found herself close to tears.
Aunt May went up to her bedroom to compose herself. Judith said to Louise, ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that I might want to marry again?’
‘No, it didn’t. I thought you would probably come to live with us eventually.’
‘That wouldn’t have worked very well.’
‘Is that why you are doing this?’
‘No. I want to marry again.’
‘Do you love him, this Austin Marriott?’
‘When I married your father, I thought I loved him. I didn’t even know him. The loving comes later.’ She thought about Austin Marriott. In only one way did he resemble Stanley. They were both men who knew what they wanted. This was the kind of man she respected. ‘The most I can say now is that there is . . . a rightness . . . about the way I feel.’
‘I felt this rightness about Guy. You didn’t think it was a sufficient answer then.’
So, Judith thought, all this time she has resented our attitude to her marriage; and now she sees me in her place, sueing for a blessing. She picked up her coat and prepared to leave. In the doorway, she said, ‘If you are all against this, I can’t do it. So you must think about it carefully.’
Louise brushed this aside with the impatience it deserved. ‘You will do what you think fit. You always have. And I daresay I’m the same. But you must let us be against it, if that is how we feel – for the time being, at least.’