The Backward Shadow

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The Backward Shadow Page 25

by Lynne Reid Banks


  Chapter 21

  THERE’S no particular need, five years after the event, to go into the details of Henry’s death. Something known and inevitable, however tragic, can’t be very moving to read about, or even interesting. It happened, in any case, very soon after the visit to London which resulted in our landing a contract with Heal’s. It comforted me quite ludicrously at the time to feel that I had managed this coup in time to give Henry the knowledge that the shop was back on the upgrade—I remember him saying to me, on one of my last visits, ‘Knowing you and Dorothy have that Heal’s thing has given me a hell of a kick. It’s going to make all the difference to her …’ Neither of us was with him when he died; it was Joanna who held his hand and listened to his voice fade out right in the middle of a sentence about Dottie. It was typical of him that he died with his brain, and his heart, still working.

  But if his death was somehow unterrible, the funeral cancelled that. I can’t recall it even now without horror. His body going sliding through those silent little doors to the bleat of organ music—one expected to see the brilliant white-hot glitter of the furnace between the discreet little curtains. It’s hideous, so euphemistic … In India at least you see the flames; it’s all out in the open air and everybody wails and you smell the fire and don’t pretend it isn’t really happening.

  Ted arrived late; we found out from Joanna later that he’d been sitting outside in the hire-car, unable to pull himself together enough to show his face in the chapel. But then at last he came in, near the end, his face mournful and somehow simian above the impeccable morning dress with its grey waistcoat and shiny top hat. And spats. … Dottie’s and my mutual wretchedness that day was so acute that it needed only those spats to send us both into suppressed hysterics.

  Dottie actually had to leave the chapel, and I followed her when I’d managed to get hold of myself; I found her in the graveyard outside standing erect, her whole body heaving with sobs, the tears washing down her face from red, anguished eyes. When she saw me coming she turned away from me with a moan. ‘We laughed!’ she got out at last in a whisper of awe and shame. ‘He’s dead, and we laughed! We’re ill, we’re damned, we’d laugh at anything!’

  In vain I told her to let herself off, that it was perfectly natural, I even ventured to say that Henry would have been the first to understand and even join in … Stupid of me, for she froze like a rock at the words and said coldly, ‘Don’t talk about him like that as if he were alive. He’s dead and finished.’

  I left her alone for a while, after that, but when I saw that she was not able to forgive herself I tackled her again. It was two weeks or so later, and she was much calmer, but it was an icy, lifeless sort of calm, and she answered with no hint of emotion, ‘It’s strange, but any time I’ve allowed myself to feel superior to anybody, about anything, it’s always been proved to me later that I am no better, or am even worse than they are. I used to despise my acquaintances in London because nothing was serious to them, nothing shocked them, nothing really mattered to them, and the sign of this was—they laughed, they laughed at everything, they made jokes about everything—God, the bomb, the First World War, Belsen, cruelty to children, cancer. They say it’s the English saving grace, but I think it’s our current vice. I loathe it. And yet at Henry’s funeral, with him being burnt, I laughed. I laughed at nothing, at something not at all funny: his Cockney father who had dressed in the best he could hire or buy for the occasion. I didn’t look at his face, because his tears would have shattered me; I looked at his feet—and I laughed. And so I’m just like those others. No better than those repulsive cynics and shallow gigglers. I degraded my goodbye to Henry to that level, because I just hadn’t the depth to cope with so much sorrow. That’s what’s hard to face.’

  There followed an awful period, still blacked-out in memory, when Dottie and I had to struggle along somehow with the shop, which chose that moment to start doing such good business that we couldn’t abandon it as we both wanted to, and just go into retreat. But Dottie suddenly took against it. It must have been because her passion for it had prevented her being with Henry, looking after him, during the last weeks of his life, and I suppose she began to feel about it as a man might feel about a tawdry, ravishing mistress who has kept him from his sick wife’s bedside until it’s too late. Anyway, she began to hate the place, and to curse it instead of cherishing it as she had before. First the little necessary extra bits of effort were dropped, then gradually she began positively to neglect the essential work. If we hadn’t had the Heal’s contract by that time, I really think the whole thing would just have folded; but that side of it had somehow become my baby, and I managed, despite a few initial blunders, and with Dottie’s increasingly desultory but nonetheless vital help and advice, to keep this up and make a go of it.

  I think it was the saving of me; quite incredible how the gods of fortune will help you sometimes when you most need it. I clearly remember one extraordinary coincidence, which was that the day of Toby’s wedding to Whistler—a huge splashy affair in some big synagogue near Marble Arch, all so dreadfully un-him that I immediately felt an air of doom over the marriage—was the day the ‘Us and Them’ boutique opened on Heal’s first floor, so I simply didn’t have time to feel anything about the wedding. And that night, which I had thought would be a major private hell (deep down somewhere in my subconscious, Toby was still mine in the most primitive physical way) I slept like the dead and my imagination with me. By the next morning the worst was over, though even the best of that little lot was not very funny, and the pain—dull, but constant—went on literally for months.

  About now Dottie grew downright impossible; she withdrew; she grew surly, sulky, bad-mannered, bad-tempered. She was not drinking, but she behaved as if she were. She did as little work as possible, and that with very bad grace. Her contacts with suppliers fell off, and I found myself having to make furtive journeys round the countryside renewing them and often having to smooth out rudenesses or bad impressions Dottie had left, either by unanswered letters, unpaid bills, or hasty visits made in a bad mood.

  As to her relations with me, they were all right at first—I never took her to task about her failure to pull her weight in the shop, I felt it was only fair after all the months when I hadn’t, and anyway I understood only too well what was the matter with her. But suddenly one horrible evening she turned on me over supper. There was no warning; we were just sitting there eating in what I had fondly supposed was a mutually sympathetic silence, when she abruptly looked at me and said icily, ‘I must ask you to stop apologising for me.’ I was completely taken aback; I really didn’t know what she meant. Though I happened to have spent most of the previous week doing just that, I had no idea that she knew it. There followed an awful sort of one-sided row, with me being very pacific and she getting angrier and wilder until I realised that my lack of appropriate reaction was only making her worse. Then I let myself start shouting too. It was as calculated as that, to begin with; but fatal of course, because as soon as I let go of the tight rein I had had myself on, I found out that I really had been resenting her behaviour, although I had thought I was being so damned Christian and noble about understanding it. To excuse myself a little for losing my temper as I very shortly did with her, I have to say I was functioning under some considerable strain myself; Henry had been dead barely six weeks, Toby married less than three; and I was feeling the full brunt of running a business and raising a baby for the first time virtually without any support or help from anyone.

  The end of it was almost unbearably ugly. Suddenly I saw that it wasn’t just a row, she was actively hating me. I stopped shouting and asked what was really the matter? Whereupon she started shaking all over and her face went foreign; I can’t think of another word to describe it; I hardly recognised even her type for that moment. And then she screamed something mercifully incoherent into my face, and after that … Well, after that she began to hit her head against the wall and smack her own face over and over a
gain and I was so horrified and shocked that it was several minutes before I could do anything about it. I’ll never forget the feeling of her wrist when I caught hold of it, it was completely rigid and as strong as iron, she just kept slapping and slapping herself viciously, and I remember shouting at her, ‘Slap me! Slap me!’ and frantically trying to redirect her hand. I can’t bear to think about it, even now. She collapsed in the end, teeth chattering, face all shades of grey, eyes rolling, sweat standing out all over her … I put coats over her and called a doctor, but by the time he came she’d recovered a bit and I’d managed to get her upstairs to bed. He gave her a sedative and told me it looked like the onset of a nervous breakdown, which is what it was of course; I should have seen she was heading for one but I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown really was until then.

  Later that night—I was sitting beside her bed, frightened to leave her alone although she was fast asleep—she suddenly came wide awake for a few minutes and stared straight at me through the half-darkness and said, ‘Did you sleep with him?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Swear it.’ ‘I do swear it.’ ‘How can I be sure? How can I ever be sure? I know you wanted him. If he refused me and took you—’ She broke off with a sort of sudden crack like a branch breaking, and instantly closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

  So that was it, and I hadn’t properly understood after all, until that moment.

  She was laid up for a long time and I tried to look after her and run the shop. I couldn’t, naturally enough, so I compromised by getting a nurse in, and also engaging an assistant for the shop, a wretched brainless little girl who was the best I could get for what I could afford to pay. She distinguished herself the first week by breaking a supposedly unbreakable casserole, losing two important customers through sheer incompetence and—as I discovered much later—laying the foundations for a profitable sideline, pinching half-crowns from the petty cash.

  The nurse was little more successful; she was efficient but chilly, and Dottie just lay there and didn’t even look at her. I began to have terrible fears about the actual extent of her breakdown, remembering that moment when I had not recognised her eyes or her face. She was certainly mad at that second. Sometimes when she withdrew and couldn’t be roused, I really feared for her reason. At that time I remembered nothing but good of her, her sweetness, her inexhaustible energy, her irrepressible wit and good cheer and—I knew it all the time—her genuine love for me which had lasted over years of rough going for one or other of us. I would sit in the evenings and do my accounts on the end of her bed, while she sat propped against her pillows and smoked and seemed either a little nearer or a little further away, according to some inner syndrome which I never fully understood or could predict. She never linked Henry’s and my names again. Once I was working and she suddenly leaned right forward in bed and put her hand over mine as I was writing figures; I looked up and she was gazing at me with an extraordinary expression of tenderness and regret … I jumped up at once and went to hug her. I thought in that moment everything was better, but I found it wasn’t that simple. That impulse, that look, the gesture even, had been, as it were, sent through some kind of barrier, the barrier of her illness, and when I tried to get close to her, physically and mentally, the gate clanged almost in my face and she pushed me away, her eyes tightly shut as if something had escaped from them while she wasn’t on her guard.

  That whole time—the time following Henry’s death, Toby’s marriage and Dottie’s breakdown—was a time of seasoning and trial for me. That I have never worked so hard, or felt so deeply, or travelled as far in an inward fashion, hardly needs saying. And all the time, except when I visited London on business, 1 was living in the same tucked-away little backwater. Addy’s cottage was my home and my retreat, though it had lost its feeling of safety since Dottie had lodged herself and her strangeness like a cuckoo’s egg within it. I realise now that, although I never acknowledged it at the time, I was more than a little afraid of her then. It was almost a superstitious fear, as if I half-expected her to metamorphose again into a wild-eyed stranger; yet I never cared for her so much, nor so strongly sensed in her a desperate dependence on me. Sometimes this would show itself as simply and directly as it would have done with a child; she would look at me as I brought her a meal or helped her to dress (she was physically very weak at first) and say ‘Thank you, Jane,’ over and over again, very softly and politely. At other times she would suddenly get panicky for no special reason and say ‘Don’t leave me, will you?’ in the sort of voice she might have used if she’d been hanging over a cliff. Even as she began to get better, and some of her old independence and spirit returned, she would still have moments of humble and embarrassing gratitude to me, speaking as if I’d saved her life. She never, at any time, then or since, referred to the scene in the kitchen. I’ve always hoped she doesn’t remember it.

  During her illness, I really think David was of more active, therapeutic help to her than either I or the doctor or any other single factor. At first I tried to keep him out of the room, for fear of disturbing her, but one day he wandered in by himself and when I went looking for him I found she’d pulled him up on the bed with her. He was lying with her, stomach to stomach, and they were pulling faces at each other, and he was laughing and saying ‘More! More!’ When I lifted him off, he reached for her and said her name, I think for the first time. Later when I came back to her alone, I heard her from outside the door repeating, with his inflection, ‘Do-tie. Do-tie.’ When I came in, I found she was crying. It was the first time since the funeral—months. The doctor had said, ‘Where are her tears? That’s what she needs, she needs to cry, healthy tears, you understand.’ And here they were, gently washing those hard, dry, wild eyes as she said her own name over and over again. After that I let him go in and play with her as often as he wanted to. She cried often, just cried for no special reason when he was with her or after he’d gone, and the doctor when I told him said ‘Good.’ And it was.

  It was a long time before she asked about the shop, but she often talked about Addy’s four hundred pounds. It was odd about that. I’d given it up—sacrificed it, as I then thought—for the shop, and relinquished my cherished dreams of a trip to New York. But it had all been, as it were, an empty gesture. When Dottie asked for the money, and I gave it to her, neither of us had stopped to realise that Henry, with his inveterate providence and good sense, had long before taken the precaution of covering the premises with every known kind of insurance. The four hundred was used up in immediate costs, for Dottie got cracking the very next day at putting the shop back in order and we had very little in the kitty by then; but when the Insurance people paid up, which they did quite quickly, Henry insisted that I should take it back. It was very ironic, because there was still time for me to go to New York for Addy’s book, if I hurried; but by then Henry was already ill, Dottie working desperately, and just in case I had been in any sort of doubt or temptation (which I really wasn’t) David developed something-or-other, I’ve forgotten what, and couldn’t possibly have either come with me or been left behind. So there the £400 still was, sitting in my bank, and when I thought of it it was as if Addy’s ghost was waiting for me to do something with it. I’d told Dottie long ago about Addy’s ghost, and she had readily appreciated the non-serious, emotional side of it. The truly metaphysical side, the moments when I almost believed in Addy as a tangible presence, had merely embarrassed her, so I never mentioned it again. Now in her sleep or in moments of drowsiness when her ‘dope’ as she called it was beginning to function, she would ramble on about ‘Addy’s four hundred’ and ask me repeatedly what I was going to do with it, sometimes sounding as if it were a matter of urgent personal importance to herself that I should make a decision. Sometimes she would make little anxious jokes: ‘Addy’s waiting, isn’t she? She’s waiting for you to decide. You mustn’t disappoint her.’ And once she startled me by saying quite seriously, ‘She hates money being left to rot.’ At last I said that I thought I’d better
sink it in the shop after all—it had been very hard, during the ups and downs of my first months of serious involvement in the business, not to use it. But to my surprise, Dottie was quite vehement.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘Not the shop. The shop mustn’t drink everything up. Addy likes the idea of New York.’ She smiled. ‘She said she always wanted to go there, didn’t she?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  She looked at me oddly for a moment, and said, ‘I thought you told me—’ After a while she turned away her face, and reached for a cigarette. ‘I’m sure it should be New York,’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t even want to go to New York now.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No. The shop—’

  ‘The shop, the shop! Can’t you think of anything but the shop?’

  ‘You couldn’t, for ages.’

  She didn’t reply. ‘Sublimation,’ she said at last. ‘Is it that for you too, I wonder, poor Jane?’

  I hadn’t told her a word about Toby; I hadn’t mentioned him for many weeks. Yet at that moment I felt she knew that he was—‘lost and gone forever’, almost as much as Henry was for her.

  Addy’s book came out, finally, in the autumn of that year, and it got a very few, very wonderful notices in some obscure highbrow magazines. The New York Times Book Review gave it a glancing notice, the key-word in which was ‘esoteric’, which, Billie wrote to me, was the kiss of death to any hope of popular success. ‘Not that I ever expected it from those epic-minded morons,’ she concluded furiously. But Dottie, who had just read the book for the first time, simply said, ‘Oh, never mind. It’s far too good for me, and for most people. Popular successes are for craftsmen. Addy’s not even an artist. I think perhaps she’s a sort of genius, or a saint.’ She kept the book beside her and read bits of it again and again. I did too. The book itself was beautiful, a wonderfully simple cover in pale shiny sea-green and gold. I was sure Addy would have been pleased.

 

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