‘My heart?’ she said. ‘Don’t make me laugh. My heart’s made of rubber.’
‘Then it’s safe with me,’ he said lightly.
Since coming down from Cambridge in June, he’d been working for a small fine arts institute, whose name he seemed to keep hidden, on a project to do with the Festival of Britain. She wasn’t sure if he hoped to stay on afterwards.
Once he took her back to his flat, where she met his flatmate, Martin, a sturdily built young man reading agriculture at London University, who’d been an Army middleweight. Adrian identified the family photographs grouped around the sitting-room. ‘My mother,’ he said, pointing to a dark-haired woman wearing something gauzy, dewy-eyed, with slightly parted lips. A girl, much more robust. ‘My sister Jane.’
Helen said, ‘The one who trapped the Honourable …’
‘The very one,’ he said. ‘And she hasn’t even Mother’s looks. Ravishing, isn’t she, Mother? I have her eyes, perhaps, but not much else.’ There was a picture of his brother, Hugh, killed in Normandy in 1944, aged nineteen. ‘What even now is still called the Flower of English Youth, etcetera.’
Helen said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, we all were, dear heart.’ She noticed he had the same flippant tone for everything. How little, she thought, how very little I want to get mixed up there. Yet she felt in his company a heady excitement or sense of danger, none of which was sexual. She described it to herself once, as ‘being found out’.
The Proms had started by then. On her free afternoon and evening once he turned up suddenly and said ‘They’re playing my tune. The Eroica. No seats left, though. I perceive the unfortunate need to queueooey …’ Which they did. But he brought with him a picnic so elaborate, so extravagant, and so unlike the austerity spam sandwiches and bready sausages being eaten around them. From a wicker hamper he brought out champagne, and cold chicken legs, peaches, some Lindt chocolate ‘brought back by Mummy from the land of the cuckoo clock’.
They could only get in upstairs in the gallery. He snuggled up to her. Laid his head companionably on her shoulder. ‘Don’t get ideas,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t do. I mean … I’d be a ghastly disappointment – in that department, as well as in others …’
She supposed the club was doing well enough. She knew it had been widely advertised in the Catholic press and that the word had gone round in Catholic circles. Those living and working in London, of every age group, were beginning to use it. At the end of her first month a retired Colonel took up residence. She saw him every morning, leaving the dining-room as she came in. She knew he went to Mass every morning in Cadogan Street. In the evening he would come into the bar when they first opened and drink a double whisky. Often he was the only person and if Terry for some reason had not yet arrived, she and he would talk. He often had a book with him. She noticed twice: the Catholic Book Club. He would ask her little questions about the weather and what she had been doing with her free time. ‘Dancing,’ he said often, ‘I’m sure you like dancing. All young girls like dancing … Where do you go?’ he asked another time. ‘I hear the Pheasantry’s very pleasant. And the Café de P, has that opened up again yet?’
The arrival of Terry had cut him off. ‘Ghastly weather we’ve been having. And after all that sunshine. Makes you feel winter’s just round the corner.’
Another time he was taking afternoon tea in the club sitting-room, and seeing her come in, invited her to join him. It was her afternoon off, she had come in only to collect a cardigan left on a chair – so she agreed.
He was a widower, he told her. They had had one daughter, who had been run over when only a child. ‘Of course you don’t get over that. One doesn’t, you see … No, we were never sent another …’ His eyes had a far-away look. She tried to guess his age. She thought about mid-fifties. He told her then, suddenly, abruptly, that he had wanted to be a priest originally. But the army tradition in the family had been so strong. ‘One gets talked out of these things. It’s easy to be talked out of something, when you’re young.’ He talked a lot about the ‘young’. Once he said wistfully, thoughtfully, ‘Of course it’s not too late now, I suppose.’
One evening in early September, Adrian came into the Bellarmine, accompanied by a young man with light red hair, already receding, and glasses, which he took off at once. He had a milky skin, lightly freckled and an open, gentle face.
‘Dear heart, may I introduce Dermot Vinney, erstwhile school-fellow. Just starting in the City as – oh dear, I can’t recall. But it’s money, filthy lucre – getting or spending or something …’
‘In fact,’ Dermot said quietly, ‘it’s advertising. In the West End.’
‘There I go again, fantasizing – he looks, does he not, dear heart, as if he should have charge of the nation’s coffers?’
No, Helen thought, he did not. And even less, someone from the world of advertising.
A man sitting nearby said, ‘You aren’t handling the Guinness account by any chance? With a name like that –’
Adrian said, ‘We met – re-met I should say – after three years out in the world, on the steps of the Oratory. I was just going in to Confession. He was just coming out. His soul looked very clean.’
Dermot said Adrian always was impossible.
All that evening, she felt his eyes on her. Adrian said a little later:
‘You’re not shy about Dermot here knowing you’re a real bona fide, paid up, professional singer?’
‘Opera?’ Dermot asked. ‘Oratorio? Lieder?’
‘Dance band.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and smiled. The group sitting round the bar began to tease him:
‘Anyway, does the fellow drink Guinness or not?’
‘I did at Oxford, but not now.’
‘He’s so rich – advertising, I mean to say. Is it spirits, Dermot young fellow-me-lad?’
Adrian said, ‘Only fifty per cent of him can wear the green. His Da’s ever so English.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, but his sister Bridget’s a nun … How’s that for holiness? And I’m not sure he hasn’t an uncle a priest.’
‘Can he not speak for himself?’
‘He can,’ Dermot said. ‘Put a sock in it, all of you.’
Two days later he wrote to her. The letter was delivered by hand, and invited her to see Kiss Me Kate. She was to let him know which evenings she had free next month, and he would buy the tickets. There was no telephone number, only an address in Baron’s Court. She wrote back saying yes (after all, why not?) And waited to hear more.
He didn’t come in to the bar again. Nor did Adrian for a while. She was oddly disappointed, wanting to say to him, ‘That friend you brought in the other night, he’s asked me out.’ Then about a week later he appeared in a group of six.
‘Dear heart, I haven’t been in touch for simply æons. I was in Malta with Mummy. Just look at my suntan. And what have you been up to?’
Nothing at all, she told him. She didn’t mention the letter from Dermot, although she wasn’t sure why. (She didn’t think of herself as ‘Adrian’s girlfriend’. And nor, she supposed, did anyone else …)
Then Dermot telephoned while she was on reception. He had the tickets for next week, he said. She must suggest where to eat – ‘You know London better than me. Tell me, and I’ll book.’ She could only think of Gennaro’s. ‘Gennaro’s it shall be.’
It was an odd evening, if only because so often while she was looking somewhere else, she would be aware of his gaze on her. She was uneasy with his mixture of diffidence and anxiety to please, with at the same time a steeliness underneath, at variance with the soft voice and manner.
Over the meal he talked about himself, drawn out by her. He had wanted first to hear all about her, her background, her past. But she never got further, that first date, than telling him about being an evacuee and ‘very unhappy’. Uncle Jack and Auntie Hilda was not a tale to be told over the gnocchi and the Valpolicella. Instead she had deflected him on to h
is childhood.
‘It should have been happy, God knows all the ingredients were there. But I wasn’t. It wasn’t. I only wanted to be grown up. And there was such a long way to go …’ Yes, well, there had been prep school, and public school and National Service, in the Army. ‘In the army I wasn’t sure I liked being grown up, after all.’ Yes, Oxford had been all right. Not bad at all.
He confessed that he wasn’t very used to taking girls out. ‘Not one, the whole time at Magdalen. Lady Margaret and Somerville, the women’s colleges – too alarming. And then nurses, foreign girls. I never somehow got round to it.’ For someone so fearful, the advertising world seemed hardly the place. She would have imagined Adrian more suitable. She said this. He seemed surprised.
‘That’s quite different … It’s just ideas, after all. I have the ideas, and they say whether they like them or not … Maybe it is kill or be killed – but it doesn’t feel that way. My family are horrified, of course. It’s not a worthwhile occupation at all …’
She spoke about the Bellarmine, and her work, but not why she had gone there. She joked about the triumvirate watching over her, about how easily Geoffrey got agitated, and how Dorothy was the calming influence, about the Colonel who read Catholic Book Club books and had even been seen, only yesterday, with a Knox New Testament alongside his double whisky. (’What do you think of this?’ he’d asked her, for all the world as if her opinion mattered.)
It was after one o’clock when he brought her back in the taxi. He said rather solemnly, ‘We must be careful not to wake up your colonel.’ Then just as she reached for her key, he grasped her arm and turned her to him, kissing her very lightly on the lips.
He said, his voice low, ‘I hope you don’t think that’s rather cheek, on a first date …’
Surprised, she said easily, with a little laugh, ‘Oh no, I think it’s rather sweet.’
He didn’t appear in the bar again. Several days passed. Adrian, and friends, came again, but no reference was made to Dermot. Adrian, who seemed a bit offhand, distracted, not as cheerful as usual, said, ‘You look cheery, dear heart. All the cares of the world are wearing me down. Nothing in particular, you know, but everything in general, which is of course much worse. Better by far a named sorrow.’
Later he said, ‘You must come and liven me, dear heart. I shall give a little supper for you. Or what about shaking our livers up at Battersea fun fair?’
The next day Dermot slipped into the Club at lunch-time. She was in the restaurant. Miss Gittings at the desk sent down for her.
‘I’m sorry, not ‘phoning,’ he said, in an urgent semi-whisper, ‘I wanted to speak in person. I was too shy – too silly, the other night … I have to go away tomorrow. It’s a family holiday in Cornwall, we’ve a house there. We always go. The agency are honouring the holiday even though I’m such a short time there. I’ll be away three weeks – it’s rather long. I don’t know how to say this – but you won’t? I mean, if someone else …’
‘Oh heavens,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ll still be here when you get back.’
‘I never asked, you see, I ought to have done –’ his voice went into even more of a whisper, under the watchful eye and listening ear of Miss Gittings. ‘Never asked if there was – anyone else? If you’ve already –’
‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no one else.’
He wrote to her five times from the family’s holiday house, near Rock in North Cornwall. The letters were not very interesting. He mentioned a campaign at work for a new margarine. Sitting over a beer of an evening, or driving round the Cornish lanes, faded fuchsia in the hedges – he’d come up with some idea which might do. Every English, leafy English, clotted cream, milkmaids, ‘even though the wretched stuff won’t have been within miles of a cow’. Once or twice the weather had been good enough for surfing. He referred to the family without explaining the names. Including some cousins, there seemed to be at least ten of them.
In his absence she felt oddly lonely. So when the Colonel asked her to join him at his table for dinner, she accepted. The going was heavy. He discussed Thérése of Lisieux, the Little Flower, moving delicately on to the vow of chastity Thérése’s parents had made when first married, and how in the end it was the wife who had decided to end it. He wanted Helen’s opinion. She’d never given such matters thought. (How happily, with what joy, before the guilt, I surrendered myself to Eddie.) She strove to project herself into this other world. She said, ‘Well, of course, if they hadn’t, there’d have been no Little Flower. Someone has to make the saints, don’t they?’
Later he spoke of his wartime experience in the Desert. She tried to remember where Guy had been in Africa, to try and match up. But then to think of Guy was to think of Palermo …
Adrian, a little unkempt, collar open, slightly irritable, came and whirled her away to the Classic in the King’s Road, and a meal after. Kosher margarine again. She thought of Dermot and his budding margarine campaign. Adrian told her, ‘If I seem disconsolate, dear heart, on the very edge of tears, it’s problems with my love-life. It’s going horribly wrong. And Mother Church is really not helping at all.’ She asked no questions.
And then Dermot was back. ‘You never answered my letters,’ he said.
‘You put no address,’ she said.
‘Didn’t I? I’m always doing things like that. The family wouldn’t be at all surprised.’
She asked about the margarine campaign. ‘Quite stuck,’ he said. His ideas had got so far and would go no further. Meanwhile someone else was trying to work in piskies. ‘I ask you, for God’s sake, piskies! The whole thing’s been taken out of my hands. We’ll lose the account, for certain.’ He had been put now on to a coffee advert. ‘Kaffee Kup, it’s called. That’s wrong for a start. Too German – too soon. Of course it’s at least one third chicory and quite disgusting. I’ll bring you some …’
A few weeks later he invited her for the weekend, to meet his family. They lived in Buckinghamshire, in a Tudor house not far from Amersham. In the train going down he prepared her, making sense of some of the names in the letters. ‘We’re rather a large family on my mother’s side. The Teague cousins, over in Ireland – when we visit there, that really is something. Hundreds of them … But just at home now, there won’t be many.’
There were six children, but only two lived at home: an older brother, recently qualified as a solicitor and now in business in nearby Hemel Hempstead, and Dermot’s little sister, Maureen, who was a weekly boarder at a nearby convent. There were almost ten years between Dermot and her. Dermot explained embarrassedly, ‘They thought it was safe, you see.’
The absent ones were Michael, the oldest, a married sister, Patricia, and Bridget, the Carmelite nun. Brilliant, Dermot called Michael. A first in Greats in 1939, then straight into the Guards. Fought in France and Greece, decorated twice. Now he was in the Foreign Office, posted to The Hague. ‘The sky’s the limit for him, in the FO.’
Patricia was known as Cakey. She had called herself that as a child after the Patacake nursery rhyme, and seemed happy to keep the name. She too was brilliant. A First at Cambridge in ‘41, in History, and then straight into the WRNS. She had not enjoyed her war. ‘Such a frightful waste of time – when I could have been getting on with being a wife and mother.’
She was certainly that now. On the Sunday she came over for the meal. Her husband farmed twenty miles away but was too busy to come with her. She had met and married in 1945, and had four children already. She was expecting the fifth. ‘No we don’t mean to stop. I just think it’s all absolutely wonderful.’ She was dark and vivid and confident: ‘Has anyone heard from Bridget? We’ll have to get our letters in before Advent starts.’
Mr Vinney asked Helen, ‘What do you think of our having a Carmelite daughter?’
She wasn’t sure what the family made of her. Once or twice she was referred to as ‘Dermot’s girl’, which he didn’t deny, but which made him blush furiously. She didn’t care for the way they treate
d Dermot, belittling him continually. She found herself wanting to protect him. They were scathing about his job. ‘Sandwich boarding,’ they called it. Mrs Vinney made remarks about ‘filling in till you find your true vocation, Dermot’.
On the Sunday morning they went for a long country walk together – his idea. On the way back, he turned the conversation towards love, sex, religion. He told her:
‘I’ve never … You see, I just feel purity’s terribly important. I think if a girl’s expected to keep pure herself, then why shouldn’t a man? I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m not absolutely normal. But I just wanted you to know – because I think I’m falling in love with you. Which makes me very happy. Does it you – a bit?’
‘I’m terribly touched …’ She didn’t commit herself. She couldn’t. But although she felt wryly amused at the way her purity was taken for granted, she felt sad too.
Back in London, they settled down to regular dates. He would come to the Club to fetch her but never came into the bar. She was secretive about him. She thought of him privately as the rock on which she leaned. Dermot is there, she would say to herself, there’s always Dermot. She was not even sure what she meant.
Two weeks before Christmas, he went to Ireland in connection with the promotion not of Guinness but of some sort of cake. While he was gone she had tea with the Colonel. He told her of an audience he had had before the war with the newly enthroned Pius XII. And speaking of Rome, there was a showing of Open City at a small club he knew. Would she possibly consider accompanying him?
After the film, he took her to Wheeler’s. ‘It’s a Friday, of course, and although the ruling doesn’t obtain, it’s good to be able to keep it whenever possible.’ Over a Graves supérieur and Dover sole, he asked her to marry him.
‘I feel very apprehensive of asking on such a slight acquaintance. So little time spent together. But I have seen you going about your duties in the Club …’ The words floated around her. ‘… good Catholic girl. Catholic woman … emboldened to make … rather surprising request –’
The Golden Lion Page 44