I meant, of course, that he might have wanted an outright assurance from me that he was Antonia’s father. I could see by the quick glance he gave me that he understood what was in my mind. All he said, however, was, “No, no, Vicky, The cross-examination’s over, Your Counsel is perfectly satisfied on every point—every point.”
“Well then! If that’s so, witness will go and get the supper. Do you—you aren’t on a diet or anything, are you, Raymond?”
“No, no. Just give me all your ration of butter, milk, cheese and eggs for the week, and I’ll be perfectly satisfied. May I go up and have a glance at Antonia now?”
I was glad that the atmosphere had lightened back to joking-level before he again made this request. I did nevertheless feel that, with the weight of things just said (and unsaid, too) still lying on us, I would prefer not to accompany him. Had we gone up to see Antonia the minute he arrived, I would have treated the episode with ironic amusement, mocked a little perhaps at its obvious sentimental appeal.
“Yes, certainly. I’ll just point out the room to you and then start getting the supper. The light’s just inside the door and you can switch it on. She’s certain to be sound asleep by now, so it won’t wake her. Look—up the stairs, that door on the left. See?”
Raymond nodded, and I left him to it.
I was in the kitchen when he came down.
“Tray in front of the fire, I think, don’t you, Raymond?”
“Yes—delightful. Vicky, there was a teddy-bear which seemed to be in difficulties. Antonia was fast asleep all over it, I rescued it and tucked it in more neatly beside her. She never stirred. That was a permissible thing to do, I hope?”
“Yes, certainly, thank you, Raymond. I should have done the same myself later. I practically always have to.”
“She’s very alluring, Vicky. I like that white hair. It is white, isn’t it?”
“Practically. Her eyes, however, I hasten to assure you, are not pink.”
“Blue?”
“No—hazel, just to trick you.”
“H’m. Altogether rather fun. Let me help you with that tray, Vicky.”
Neither Raymond nor I made any further reference to Antonia or to our past that evening. During supper I learnt more about Raymond’s course of treatment at the Sanatorium just outside Harminster—how they had performed on him operations which he alluded to as A.P.’s. A.P., I learnt, stood for ‘artificial pneumothorax.’ (“Come, Vicky, you must learn the jargon.”) How, although he had left the Sanatorium five months ago, he had been going back regularly for ‘refills.’ (“‘Refills, Raymond?’” “There now, I knew I should have to take to paper and pencil and drawing diagrams before I was through. No, let’s be a little more ingenious. Look, that pepper-pot’s my lung, and the toast-rack will do beautifully for my ribs. Now this knife is the needle that the surgeon sticks through the toast rack to blow in air—hand me the bellows, Vicky—between the toast-rack and the pleura, thus collapsing the pepper-pot-—I’m laying it flat, you see—so that it has a rest and a chance to heal. You have to keep on repeating the operation because the lung expands itself again.”)
I must confess that I found it all very interesting. If anybody had ever told me that T.B. and teddy-bears would be two of the topics Raymond and I would discuss at our first reencounter, I should have laughed heartily at such an impossible absurdity.
I was quite startled when I heard Blakey’s step in the hall. I had no idea it was so late.
“And now I must be going, Vicky,” said Raymond, rising to his feet.
“Where are you living? I never asked you?”
“I’m staying in a small hotel over the other side of the town. I’ve been able to find a certain amount of work to do here—legal army work. Funnily enough, I haven’t been positively invalided out of the army yet. I even hope (with the aid of the Colonel, who’s a friend of mine) to get a War Office job, if this last X-raying is satisfactory.”
“I’m so glad,” I said vaguely. “Well, Raymond—”
I paused, groping uncertainly for some suitable formula of farewell.
“‘It’s been so nice meeting you again?’” suggested Raymond, with a glint of amusement in his eye. “Or ‘May I ring for a taxi for you?’”
“Well—may I?” I said, smiling.
“No, thank you, Vicky. I’ll walk round to the garage and pick one up or else find a bus. No . . . I don’t think we shall find anything very suitable to say, so I’d better be going quickly. Which, is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed myself very much this evening. My coat I left in the hall, I think.”
I followed him out. The situation was, once again, entirely under his control.
“Thank you for having me, Vicky,” said Raymond, gravely shaking hands.
“Raymond—you’ll let me know the result of the X-ray, will you? I can’t help being—interested.”
“Bless you, Vicky. That’s a very nice note to end on. Yes—I’ll let you know.”
The front door slammed, and he was gone.
To end on? Well, of course to end on. Had I happened to meet Raymond in the ordinary Way, we should undoubtedly have merely exchanged a few words and passed on.
Chapter 5
*
Rene’s baby was a boy, and she called him Philip, after his father.
Rene’s three weeks in the nursing-home seemed to pass very quickly. In a flash, it seemed, she was back again, and Philip became very much a member of our household.
I think it natural and even right that mothers should be utterly absorbed in their babies while they are tiny. Nevertheless, the fact remains that mothers at this stage are irritating companions. Who first said that “to understand all is to forgive all?” Personally I have always found this an optimistic observation.
I did understand that it was quite natural for Rene to think that there had never been such a baby before. I did understand that Philip’s death had centred her whole life on the child even more than would have anyway occurred. I did understand that it was sad for her that she had no home of her own to hear the baby triumphantly back to, and that the very fact that it was my house, not hers, made her even more passionately on the defensive on the baby’s account than she need have been. I understood all this well, and yet I could not help finding Rene’s attitude very trying.
The fact that I personally happen to prefer children to babies did not assist matters. It was over Antonia that I had my most direct battle with Rene.
Philip, was about six weeks old at the time and was allowed, by way of a treat, a short kick on the sofa before his six o’clock feed. Rene left us one evening to go and get Philip’s night-things ready. On this occasion Philip did not seem to be appreciating his ‘play-hour.’ He was cross and whimpery.
“Mummy, could I hold him a minute?” said Antonia hopefully.
I really did not see why she shouldn’t. I arranged her on a footstool, showed her how to put her arms, and lifted Philip carefully into them. Antonia sat very still, evidently enjoying her responsibility. Philip stopped crying and stared up at her with unwinking gaze.
I thought it was rather amusing to see them together.
Rene came into the room, saw this pretty scene, and immediately looked utterly horrified.
“Oh Vicky! She’ll drop him!” she said, and snatched Philip instantly out of Antonia’s grasp. Philip (greatly to my secret delight) burst into tears again. Antonia, whom Rene had pushed quite roughly, fell backwards off the footstool on to the floor, and looked thoroughly nonplussed and puzzled, and rather as if she might cry too.
“How could you, Vicky,” said Rene reproachfully.
“Nonsense, Rene,” I said briskly. “He was perfectly safe. I was standing close by and in any case Antonia was taking the greatest care.”
“She might so easily have toppled over and then what would have happened to poor little Philly? She has toppled over now, you see.”
“Only because you startled her and pushed her. Oh well, for God’s sak
e let’s consider the episode closed. I won’t do it again if you don’t like it—you’ve a perfect right to say so. Only presumably one wants to encourage the children to take an interest in each other.”
This incident was typical, not so much of many others (for we seldom argued directly), but of the friction that arose between us after Philip’s birth. Often and often I reminded myself that I, being by nature of things in the stronger position, ought to be the one to put myself out, if necessary, to make Rene feel that Philip was welcome. He was welcome, but there was really no chance to show it, so passionately, so almost aggressively, did Rene stand between him and the world. When he cried in the early hours of the morning I assured Rene (a little untruthfully) that be hadn’t disturbed me at all. Had I been her, I should have been enormously relieved at this casual acceptance of what is, after all, generally considered part of the nuisance a young baby may cause in a house. But Rene looked at me as if I was a perfect brute not to be worried on Philip’s account.
Blakey, although not, by profession, a children’s nurse, was a perfectly responsible person, and might well have been left sometimes to keep an eye on the pram when Philip was asleep in the garden, but Rene, if she wanted to go to the shops, always solemnly wheeled the pram with her. Blakey, I knew, was a little hurt about this (“Does Mrs. Sylvester think I haven’t got eyes in my head that I couldn’t see if it was raining and bring the pram in?”), and eventually I did suggest to Rene that it was really healthier for Philip to finish his sleep, unjolted, in the garden.
“I know it’s silly of me,” said Rene wistfully, “but somehow I don’t feel happy unless I can have a peep at him whenever I want to. Do you think that’s very silly of me, Vicky?”
“I can understand it,” I said cautiously, “but frankly, I do think it’s silly—yes.”
“I suppose it’s just the way I’m made and I can’t help it,” said Rene, deprecating and yet with an undercurrent of complacency.
This was one of the many times when I could have smacked her.
Oh, these petty little feminine bickerings! How sordid and trivial and ridiculous they are, and how passionately I feel one should rise superior to that sort of thing, and how infuriatingly difficult it is to do so. Funnily enough, I think it was I who was much more anxious to avoid anything of the sort than Rene. I disliked it more, thought it more degrading. Rene, more placid by nature than I, I thinly assumed that minor little games of taking umbrage and making it up again were the natural fabric of a woman’s life. I suspect she was one of the many people who think there’s something rather cosy about a little domestic bicker. I never asked her, but I would not be at all surprised to hear that she really began to feel more at home with me when we started these silly little rows.
My marriage with Raymond had given me no practice in learning how to manage close-quarter domestic friction. I suppose we were unusual in never quarrelling about who was to have the bath first, or whether dinner was late or not, but anyway, we never did, or wanted to. At surface-level we had no disagreements whatsoever.
Well! There I was, and there Rene and Philip were, and there was nothing on earth to be done about it except to pretend to the outer world and especially to Mother that we were getting on splendidly. Mother, at any rate, was happily installed at Chipping Campden with Aunt Maud.
As for Raymond, he was presumably back in London. He had kept his promise and written me a short note to tell me that the results of the X-ray examination had proved to be entirely satisfactory, and that he hoped very much to get this legal job in the War Office. I tore up the letter with the feeling that I had tidied up the last loose end between us.
Domestic affairs being a little strained, and my future seeming more than a trifle dreary, I was quite glad of a sudden recrudescence of work at the office. London was in a more normal state by this time. Round about Christmas-time there was a lull in the raids, and, by the middle of January, the town was perceptibly filling up again.
The Dorothy Harper situation, which I had discussed with Barry, had been allowed to stand over for a while. Dorothy Harper had evacuated herself with all speed at the beginning of the blitz to her Cornish cottage. Not that I blame her—there was no reason why she should stay to be bombed. Only I couldn’t help smiling a little when she came prancing back into the office in the middle of January with two nice new short stories, one about the heroism of an old woman in the blitz, the other about a crotchety spinster in Gloucestershire, whose whole life and outlook was radically changed (for the better of course) by her child evacuee. Miss Dorothy Harper herself was loud in her complaints against the billeting officer who had tried to push a schoolboy on to her. (“‘But my dear man,’ I said—I know him well, he used to be dear Lord Portarlington’s right-hand man and was always about the place when one dropped in there—‘My dear man, how can I? Nobody is readier than myself to help, but it would not be fair on the child to billet it in a place where it could not stay. I am not here permanently myself, alas, only for a very very little time.’”) Mrs. Hitchcock caught my eye and gave me a wry grin. Dorothy Harper wafted herself out of the office, all pearls, fur-coat and scent, I am sure that she always pictured herself as bringing just a little colour and romance—a breath of the outside world—into our drab lives. As neither of us ever did anything but listen patiently while she talked her society prattle, perhaps we encouraged her in this conception. I was ‘Miss Sylvester’ to her, as I was to all our clients. I am sure that had she known that I was (like her) a divorcée, she would have been deeply shocked. Little typists in offices (she would think) have no business to be also divorced women with private lives of their own.
“It didn’t seem the moment to say anything to her about her behaviour towards us recently,” I said apologetically to Mrs. Hitchcock, as the door closed behind her. “There seemed to be such an accumulation of patronage for her to get off her chest to-day. I suppose it’s because she hasn’t seen us recently.”
“There certainly was,” said Mrs. Hitchcock grimly, “If that woman wasn’t such a gold-mine, what pleasure I should have in telling her what I thought of her!”
Generally speaking, Mrs. Hitchcock and I get on splendidly together. She is as hard as nails, and I respect her for it. She could never have built up the Agency and kept it going had she not put business always first in her life. She has no objection to the people she employs having private lives of their own—indeed, as a feminist, she rather likes to employ married women—but she has every objection to private lives being allotted to intrude in the very slightest into business hours. Men do not ask for time off from the office if their wives are ill or their children in need of an escort to somewhere or other. Why should women? Such is her ruthless and logical viewpoint. She did not re-engage me after my divorce, and Antonia’s birth out of sentiment and a desire to help—she merely knew I was a useful person in the office. She did not arrange for my benefit that I should only attend the office three days a week—it just happened that the post she could offer me, head of the short story department, had always been planned on that basis, the vast amount of reading that it entailed being done just as conveniently at home as in the office. I already knew the routine work of the office inside out, having worked there in various more underling capacities, from the time I came down from Oxford to the time I realized I was going to have a baby and fled to bury myself in the country.
Although Mrs. Hitchcock had thus already known me for close on seven years at the time I came back to her (and those seven years included a three-months business trip to New York on one occasion, when I acted as her secretary), I do not remember her ever showing the faintest curiosity about my marriage, my divorce or my child—and that, of course, in my sore and bruised mental state, was precisely what I appreciated. It was not tact—she is too downright to be vary tactful—but genuine refreshing lack of interest, tinged, I suspect, with a sort of bored cynicism. I know nothing about her own marriage, except that it took place a long time ago (she is about f
orty-five now), and lasted very few years and was childless. I imagine that it was a thorough-going mistake in every way, and that consequently she is never surprised to hear that other people have come croppers too. But after all (as I guess she feels) is that very important? Do private lives really matter as much as people pretend? Isn’t all this fuss rather silly? Isn’t work more important than futile little emotional muddles?
As I say, I like her. I know exactly where I am with her. Her attitude to life may be a limited one, but there is a pleasant lack of humbug about it.
In appearance she is smart in a severely tailored, ‘no nonsense’ style. And she runs the office well, strictly, and yet without pettiness.
She is, of course, rather a cruel woman. But even when (a little later in this story) I came directly into contact with this quality in her, I continued to like her. It was no shock to me to find out that she could be cruel. I think I had always known it and accepted it.
* * * * *
Barry, who had been away for a month during his school holidays, came back and resumed his old habit of dropping in in the evenings sometimes. Indeed, now that Rene was living with me, I think he dropped in more frequently than he had done since the day he proposed and I refused him. I expect he felt that it was more suitable for a single man to visit two women together than one alone. (When I laughingly said something of the sort to Rene, she opened her eyes very wide and said, “Well, it is really, isn’t it?”)
I never told Rene that Barry had wanted to marry me. Rene would have been romantically thrilled, of course, but I have always thought that women, unlike men, talk far too much to other women of their private affairs.
Rene liked Barry very much indeed, and told me so. I think she was quite relieved to find I had at least one friend who didn’t frighten her. Mrs. Hitchcock had come down one Sunday and Rene had stared at her like a rabbit at a snake.
Company in the Evening Page 8
