‘Well, that’s odd. I always feel it’s the other way round.’
He leant back again and looked at the ceiling, one forefinger resting on each side of his pipe-bowl. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’m a reactionary. Not so much politically, but constitutionally. I react away from things. This whole business is in the nature of a strong reaction—that’s the only way I can possibly explain it, even to myself.’
‘A reaction against what?’
‘Well, from two things. One’s private. The other’s what I’ve been busy at for the past twenty years of my life. More than twenty … I was only seventeen when I went into my dad’s business, and I’ve been hard at it ever since until he retired last year—not one moment too soon to suit me, I may say. God knows how I stuck it so long.’
‘What was it?’
He looked at me, his eyes twinkling. ‘Don’t laugh. A shop! Several, as a matter of fact. We built up quite a little chain, mostly in South London. Dad started off with one little store in Dalton, and I started off behind the counter, as delivery boy, van driver, then buyer, branch manager … in the end I was running most of it for Dad. He was a good employer, and the whole thing was a steadily increasing success. When he sold out last year, he cleared something like £75,000 net profit. Of which he generously gave me five. I suppose he was right in a way. He said it was pretty cushy severance-pay, and a good pension by any standards for a chap of my age … I didn’t resent it, or at least I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t privately known that that £5,000 was paying me for twenty years of soul-destroying work, of which, looking back on it now, I know that I hated every single day.’
‘And yet now you’re putting that money straight back into another shop.’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. But of a very different kind.’
‘What kind did your father have?’
He took the pipe out of his mouth and said succinctly, ‘Junk.’
‘Junk?’
‘Oh, not what you mean—not rags and bottles and old bedsteads, I think I might have quite enjoyed that. I mean real rubbish. Gew-gaws, trash. Tin ash-trays and table-napkin holders, cheap prints of girls with rosebud lips and chiffon dresses lying beside bright blue lakes surrounded by fairies, vases and tea-sets with flowers stamped on them, cutlery that bent and broke, plastic trays, plastic cruets, plastic waste-paper baskets, plastic lampshades, plastic doileys … Of course we had our better lines, too. Front-door chimes, plaster wall-plaques—very pricey, those can be—and a long list of “novelties”, things you hang in the windows of your car to cause accidents, musical cigarette-boxes that go wrong within a week, practical jokes, jewellery embellished by what my Dad cynically called “Irish rhinestones”, artificial flowers, brass nutcrackers shaped like girls’ legs …’
‘Enough!’ I begged. ‘It’s all perfectly clear to me now.’
‘Yes. Well. There you are,’ said Henry. ‘And what made it worse was, Dad gave me a pretty fair education beforehand. Nothing posh of course, he couldn’t afford it then—though no doubt Amanda will go to Eton, or whatever’s the female equivalent—very hot on education, my Dad. Gave me a taste for a bit of quality, and then surrounded me for twenty years with rubbish and never saw anything wrong. Three times I tried to get out, and three times he had heart attacks. Real ones … I never have known quite how he managed it. He always recovered completely as soon as I’d recanted. He’s a clever chap, my Dad is.’
‘I’ve heard of mothers doing that. Never fathers.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with gender. It’s widowed mothers who do it to only sons or daughters, and widowed fathers do it for the same reason.’
‘Loneliness?’
Fear of. Same thing.’ I suddenly thought how Father had gone on the drink after I’d left home pregnant. Was that a species of aborted moral blackmail, which he was too basically decent to actually bring to my attention?
‘You don’t like your father much, I gather,’ I remarked.
‘No, I hardly like him at all. But I love him,’ he said, with a lack of self-consciousness which was surprising. ‘Anyway he’s much nicer since he married Joanna. That’s my step-mother. She’s nearly thirty years younger than him. She’s marvellous and very attractive. Wouldn’t have minded marrying her myself. I even asked her once, but she was utterly honest about it. I had £5,000 and Dad had £70,000.’
‘How can she be marvellous if she’d do a thing like that?’ I asked indignantly. But Henry looked as if I’d disappointed him.
‘Here, don’t you be so silly, Jane! Joanna was 37 when she met Dad. She’d been trying for years and years to make a living on the stage. Security was what she was looking for, and she wasn’t ashamed to admit it. She put it to Dad quite straight—you make me safe and comfortable, she said, and I’ll make you a damned good wife, and even give you a baby if I can. Well, she could and she did, and Dad’s tickled pink. Dad and I, you know, we’d hardly spoken a word except in the way of business to each other for years until recently; but the atmosphere in that house is so happy that it’s a pleasure to go there. I think Joanna’s terrific, so lively and honest and warm, and Dad gets the overspill of my liking for her. We’re quite matey now, him and me. Funny how things happen.’
So it was that in this one conversation I learned more about Henry than in the three previous months. He was still just about the last person I’d ever have expected Dottie to fall for, and yet if she had I could completely sympathise. Sometimes I felt so fond of him myself it was almost like a kind of being in love.
Dottie returned, full of glad tidings. She’d had acceptances from a number of very ‘useful’ people, including the Vogue Shop-Hound, and a whole lot of other magazines, plus a string of ‘names’ which meant nothing to me but which she said had enabled her to set off a chain-reaction—on the strength of the names she had got the magazines interested, and vice-versa, though quite often, she said, she had been sort of buying on margin—mentioning a name to a magazine before she’d secured it, in the hope that the magazine’s ‘yes’ would inveigle the name. It usually worked. The guest-list for the opening was now so lengthy and impressive that I—and Henry too, I think—began to feel a little alarmed.
‘Are you sure they’re not going to get a disappointment when they’ve dragged themselves all the way down here?’ I asked nervously.
Dottie bridled as if I’d stabbed her. ‘Disappointment?’ she echoed. ‘They going to see wares they’ve never seen in all their lives. Anyone who’s disappointed is a mere clod who deserves to have had his journey for nothing.’
‘I hope the entertainment isn’t going to be purely aesthetic,’ said Henry somewhat dryly.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Dottie.
It turned out she’d engaged one of the best caterers in the West End to do drinks and snacks. Henry blenched when he heard the amount of the estimate, but Dottie swept him aside. ‘Think big,’ she kept saying.
‘Have I any choice?’
‘Leave this to me, now, Henry. I know exactly what I’m about.’
‘You’re about to ruin me,’ he answered, more dryly than ever.
But Dottie had more news, which I must confess was of greater interest to me than anything connected with the shop could possibly have been. She waited to impart it until we were alone in the shop, frantically rearranging the displays to accommodate a last-minute delivery of hand-carved salad bowls and spoons from the old carpenter in Gloucester.
‘I saw Toby,’ she said without preamble.
I was relieved—overjoyed, almost—to feel my blood jump in my head.
‘Oh?’ I said.
‘What “oh”? Have you gone off him?’
‘No. Tell me.’
‘Well, I wondered, because … Actually I made a point of seeking him out. I looked up his new address in your book before I left.’
‘Why didn’t you just ask me for it?’
‘I don’t know quite … some intuitive reluctance. Anyway, I just arrived one evening, and a�
�a sort of girl answered the door.’
After a long blank moment I found I had just come to a stop, like a motor which seizes up. I had to force myself to ask, ‘What do you mean, a sort of girl?’
‘Well, the sort of girl who looks a bit like a boy. You know, jeans, man’s sweater, short hair, scrubbed-looking features. Very young. Not more than sixteen I shouldn’t think.’
‘Seventeen,’ I said.
‘You know her?’ asked Dottie in surprise.
‘I know of her. Her name’s Whistler, isn’t it?’
‘She was introduced to me as Melissa Lee.’
I nodded. ‘That’s Whistler.’ I felt faint but kept my voice normal with an effort. The blood in my ears was banging curses into my head: ‘You fool, you fool, you god-damned bloody stupid bitch, it serves you right!’ I could hardly hear what Dottie was saying.
‘Toby didn’t seem specially gratified by my visit, which was understandable. He and this hermaphrodite were just sitting down to supper, which she’d evidently cooked …’
‘What was it?’ I asked ludicrously.
‘Steak,’ she replied promptly. ‘Very tough, with baked potatoes slightly burnt. The salad looked good though.’ She reported all this with meticulous care and accuracy, as if unaware of what it was doing to me—yet I knew she wasn’t unaware and I stood leaning against a trestle understanding why Cleopatra murdered the messenger who brought the news about Antony’s marriage.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘I hadn’t prepared anything, I mean any reason for coming, and I had to think of something feasible quickly, so I told him—of all things—that I’d come because you’d asked me to get John’s address. That was his name, wasn’t it—the black man?’ I nodded. ‘He gave it to me, and then asked me to have a drink. I must say he was very nice. The girl could have sliced my head off. I sat there until everything was cold, making bright chat. I felt that was the least I could do. Eventually she lost her temper and said, “I hope you don’t mind but I’m hungry.” Whereupon she sat down and furiously devoured her meal. I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. She was almost crying.’
I was almost crying myself but managed to ask, ‘Did she seem to be living there?’
Dottie made a startled movement behind my back and answered, ‘That I couldn’t say. But surely not! She’s hardly dry behind the ears—’
‘Don’t be fooled. She knows it all.’
There was a long silence while I fought a desperate battle to control my feelings and not start having hysterics. Dottie finally came up to my shoulder and asked without touching me, ‘Does it matter that much?’
‘It seems to.’
‘Then you’d better get up to town and do something about it. Only,’ she added, ‘please, love—not till after the opening.’
Chapter 13
THE advice, though selfishly motivated, was good. If I’d rushed off then and there, as I half wanted to, God knows I might have done something really awful, made a complete fool of myself somehow. As it was, I waited three days, and they were full on two levels: physically, with the preparations and the opening itself, and mentally with an endless succession of compulsive mental screen-plays—duologues and triologues which filled my brain all day and most of the night, and left me in no sort of doubt as to whether Toby was still the man I wanted. But now I took no comfort from this assurance, for my instincts tormented me with the conviction that he no longer wanted me.
The opening thus passed for me in a haze of confusion. I remember one moment when I was standing in a group of etiolated, superbly-dressed, shrieky people, all too thin and too well-groomed to seem quite real, and all of us (as I thought) were taking part in some fatuous conversation over our dry martinis when suddenly one of the men, who was wearing a ruffle-fronted pink shirt and no tie, leaned to my ear and whispered, ‘Hey, come back to us!’ I snapped my head round to him in astonishment and asked what he meant, whereupon he bared the splendid teeth of a finely-bred racehorse and said, ‘Darling, you were so far away you’d all but vanished from view.’ At that moment, as it happened, I had been actually confronting Toby and Whistler in flagrante delicto and had been on the point of flying at Whistler’s throat, so I had to blush and apologise to the young man, for whom, as I vaguely recalled, Dottie had especially asked me to be responsible. (It must be added here that all my imaginary encounters did not take such a violent or dramatic turn; in most of them I tried to be reasonable and civilised, and in my more hopeful moments my imagination contrived a tender and acceptable outcome. I think the heady atmosphere of Dottie’s party, not to mention the mixture of champagne cocktails and gin, was to blame for the sudden lapse of control over my libido.)
If the party was for me no more than a blur superimposed on my thoughts, it was certainly a blur of the brightest and most dazzling kind. I have a montage of recollections: the whole of the village high-street lined with costly cars on both sides; the bow-window encircled by a solid frieze of curious local children peering in from the outer gloom to the inner brilliance which jiggled with colour, noise and movement like a sort of audible kaleidoscope; Dottie, radiant, vital and poised as a kingfisher, swooping from group to group, her hands always filled with one of her hand-wrought wonders, her face alight as she turned it about, demanding from her audience appreciation for its beauty. Henry, alone but at ease, leaning against the fireplace with his inevitable tankard of ale in his hand, apparently dispassionately surveying the scene but in reality (unless I was mistaken) following Dottie with his eyes; only when she was lost to him in the crowd did I see him stir himself, stretching his neck a little or shifting his casual stance until he located her again. Once I saw her dart up to him and they stood together for a brief moment; she put her hand up towards his chest in one of her impulsive gestures, as if to emphasise a point, and I saw the hand stop short and stand by itself in the air for a brief, raw moment before she drew it back. This aborted movement focussed my wandering attention, and I experienced a sudden little blow over the heart like an electric shock. I didn’t know what it meant; it was as if I’d spied on a private moment in an intense personal drama. The next instant she had turned back into the crowd and Henry was alone again.
The whole business seemed to be over remarkably quickly; if Dottie hadn’t explained that this particular ‘set’ was accustomed to driving all over the countryside to attend any function from a house-party to an auction, I would have been amazed that so many sophisticates had found it worthwhile to come so far for so short a time. Abruptly the cohesion of the clot of colour crowded between the tressels broke up; groups drifted to the door, calling goodbyes; Dottie signalled to me to attend her and I stood at her side smiling and jabbering adieus while the white-jacketed caterers helped the women on with their furs. I now noticed that many of them carried our Dottie-designed carrier-bags, a vivid creation in purple, green and blue with the name of the shop—‘Us and Them’—emblazoned on it. I thought these people must have been buying things, but Dottie later explained it was bad form to take money at openings; she had merely given away a pile of these distinctive bags, each containing a tiny polished straw doll, as a publicity gimmick. She had, however, unobtrusively accepted several very lucrative orders, and all in all was in such a state of elation when the last of the guests had roared away down the high street that we had to forcibly seat her and make her calm down for fear she would twirl herself into a state of collapse, like a victim of the Willies.
We had to assure her repeatedly that it had been a wonderful success, that the chronic vacuity in the eyes of the rich and influential guests had cleared, at least momentarily, releasing gleams of wonder and dawning aesthetic delight at the taste and craft on display, that ‘Us and Them’ could scarcely have been better or more truly launched. I was really quite tight by this time and so was she, and soon she was laughing hysterically at my rather overdone sallies of praise, and then gradually the laughter changed and she began to cry.
I thought Henry might have
been a bit impatient with this, but half Henry’s charm was his unpredictability. He came straight off the table where he was sitting and went over to her, lifting her quite gently and saying, ‘That’s enough, now. It’s been a busy day. Time to be getting home.’ He led her quietly out of the shop, leaving me to turn out the lights and lock up; I lingered a bit to tidy up, and after a few minutes Henry returned alone and threw me Dottie’s keys. ‘I’m taking her home in my car,’ he said. ‘Could you bring hers?’ I said of course, and just as he was going out he paused in the doorway and said indistinctly, without looking at me, ‘And if you can manage not to hurry …’
‘Henry …’
‘What?’
There was a pause while I tried to think how one says things like that when one is not sure of one’s ground or even of one’s hearer, and then mumbled gauchely, ‘I could sleep at your place tonight, if you liked.’
He hesitated a moment, and then said in a rough, angry voice—but not as if he were angry with me—‘No. No, don’t.’ His manner softened apologetically. ‘I want a chat with her, that’s all.’ Then he went off again; I saw him walking quickly past the bow-window with his funny, short-man’s step, a slight spring in the toe as if trying to make himself feel taller. His face was hard and the whole set of his body looked rigid, as if he was holding himself in.
I made my superficial tidying-up into something a bit more elaborate, until everything was ready to open the doors properly the following Monday. The caterers, albeit the best in the West End, had left quite a mess, so it all took time, but I wasn’t sure at the end if it’d taken long enough, so as it was still only 9 o’clock I wandered into the only local cinema, of which the box-office had already closed, and watched the last three-quarters of quite a good film for nothing. The champagne had made me light-headed enough to be able to push my unhappy thoughts of Toby right to the back of my mind and sink without trace into the pure escapism of that movie—an hour and a half of total relaxation which couldn’t have been equalled (judging by the past two wretched nights I’d passed) even in sleep.
The Backward Shadow Page 14