Company in the Evening

by Ursula Orange

  “Actually we were both considerably in the wrong,” I remarked, as the pram with its wailing occupant, disappeared from sight. “But my God! I feel as if we were entirely in the right. Don’t you?”

  “Anybody would feel passionately in the right after talking to that woman for a little,” rejoined Raymond.

  “Oh well! We’d better have tea,” I said.

  * * * * *

  Although I am quite capable of losing my temper and not disliking doing so at the time, I always pay for it in retrospect. I know people who assert that “a good row clears the air.” This has never been my experience. “Rows” are never “good” to me, but always leave a nasty taste in my mouth.

  Although tea with the children was a cheerful talkative meal, and although I was busy after tea clearing away and then putting Antonia to bed, I could not altogether forget the unpleasantness with Mrs. Massingham. It rankled vaguely at the back of my mind. After Antonia was tucked up, and I had the opportunity of a little quiet conversation with Raymond, I reverted to the subject, knowing perhaps that I was being tiresome in doing so, but unable to help myself.

  “I must warn Harry and Margaret that, if Mrs. Massingham says anything to them, they mustn’t divulge that you’re my divorced husband,” I said, with a slightly forced laugh. “That would finish me in her eyes.”

  A shade crossed Raymond’s face.

  “Surely you don’t care what a woman like that thinks of you?” he suggested.

  “Raymond, you didn’t mind me calling you ‘my husband’ to her, did you?” I said tentatively. “I know I oughtn’t to have done it—but I just had to. And you backed me up splendidly. I was so grateful to you.”

  “No, Vicky, at the time I heartily supported you. I nearly cheered when you said it. Only—why not let the whole thing drop now? Why tell Harry and Margaret?”

  “Oh, just because Mrs. Massingham might start complaining to them about me—she’s just that sort of woman.” I paused, examining Raymond’s rather reticent expression with some lack of comprehension. “I’ll just make a joke of it all, you know,” I ended up reassuringly.

  “An excellent joke,” said Raymond grimly.

  “Raymond! Whatever is the matter?”

  “Nothing. Let’s joke like anything. We’ve always been good at that, whatever else we failed at.”

  “I gather from your sardonic expression that nevertheless the joke doesn’t appeal to you, and that you’d rather I didn’t tell Harry and Margaret?” I hazarded.

  “I think the joke, appropriate as it was at the time, might now be allowed to drop.”

  “All right,” I said meekly.

  I thought it curious of Raymond to mind about a little point like this, but everybody has his or her sensitive spots and everybody’s are in different places.

  “You don’t feel at all that way yourself, Vicky?” said Raymond, shooting a sudden enquiring glance at me.

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “I meant it would be the easiest thing in the world for you to retail it all to Harry and Margaret as a joke? You think it funny yourself?”

  “Well, Raymond . . .” Airiness died on my lips. Quite suddenly, as I looked at him, standing rather tall and haggard by the mantelpiece, a note of warning rang like a bell in my mind. I must not hurt Raymond’s feelings, even though, I dimly apprehended, he was in some way asking for them to be hurt.

  “It’s like this, Raymond,” I said. “Of course at the time—whatever I pretended—I didn’t think our divorce in the slightest amusing. It hurt frightfully. I couldn’t possibly have made a joke out of it.”

  “Oh, it did hurt you frightfully at the time, did it?” interjected Raymond. “Thank you, Vicky, for telling me. I was never quite sure. I take it that you’re completely—‘cured,’ shall we say?—now?”

  “Oh Raymond!” I sighed. “Isn’t it a mistake to get on to this subject really?”

  “You’re right. It is. We ought to go on playing the good old game of ‘gestures’ ad nauseam. My only apology is that it was you who first put the idea of the how much we did play at ‘gestures’—you and I—into my head, and now I can’t leave the idea alone, curse it. I’m always wondering . . .” He swept a restless impatient hand over his head, as if to brush away the speculations that worried him.

  “Yes, Raymond?” I said softly (I had to speak warily so as not to frighten away this new Raymond I was seeing now, a defenceless, confiding Raymond of whose very existence I had been unaware.)

  “Always wondering how much you’re playing a game of civilized divorce now, just as I am, and whether, frankly, the game’s worth the candle. Wouldn’t it be better to chuck it all up as too difficult and not meet again?”

  “You do find the game difficult, do you Raymond? I hadn’t realized.”

  I hadn’t. I had often smugly congratulated myself on the ease of our newly established relationship. The game had not been difficult for me—but then I, as I suddenly and entirely for the first time realized, had been all along in the stronger position. Five years ago I had sent away Raymond of my own free will, and that agony had burnt itself out, furiously but utterly. Then Antonia had come into my life, and gradually filled a bigger and bigger part of it, and besides that I had my work and my own home. What had been Raymond’s lot compared to mine? A broken “affair” with Sandra, no real home, a career disrupted by the war, tuberculosis.

  “Oh Lord yes, I find the game difficult,” Raymond was saying wearily, as all these thoughts flashed, startling in their novelty, through my head. “I thought you guessed that—that night at my flat. Didn’t you realize that to have you actually staying there would be more than I could stand?”

  “You mean you’d have wanted to make love to me?” I blurted out, amazed.

  Raymond gave a faintly amused smile at my evident astonishment.

  “Nothing quite so crude and direct as that, Vicky. Making love isn’t the only thing one misses, surely? No, the position is just that every step seems so simple and obvious—why not meet for lunch, why not meet for dinner, why not come down here for the day; why not get to know Antonia? All incredibly sensible and all most frightfully mistaken. Why should I tantalize myself at this so obviously too late hour? Where’s it leading us to? Nowhere. It’s not worth it, Vicky. Let’s chuck it.”

  “Oh no, Raymond!” I cried impulsively.

  It was not that the thought of a future without Raymond appalled me. It did not, much as I should miss our occasional outings. It was just that I felt that I could not bear things to end on such a miserable note.

  “My dear,” said Raymond gently, “I’m being entirely selfish over this, you know. You didn’t answer my question as to whether you consider yourself ‘cured’ of me now, but you needn’t. I can see for myself you are. The game’s easy for you, and therefore you’ve no objection to going on meeting me. Unfortunately I’m not as ‘cured’ as you are. I thought I was, but it’s becoming more and more apparent I’m not. So I think really I’d prefer to stop. I’m only sorry I’ve dragged all this up first, instead of just quietly stopping.”

  “Oh no Raymond! It’s much better surely to have things out. We never did before, did we? Not properly, Raymond, if we must part we must, but there is something I want to say to you first . . .”

  Raymond had just paid me the compliment of being at last honest with me about his feelings towards me now. I wanted badly in return to tell him something of my feelings towards him at the time of my divorce—how I had been by no means as hardboiled about it all as I had appeared, how I had genuinely believed that he did not want “forgiveness” from me but freedom to marry Sandra instead, how clearly I now saw that I had been wrong in concealing, out of pride, the fact that I was going to have a baby, and finally how, although it was true I was “cured” now, I was not at all sure that the “cure” had been on sound foundations of real comprehension and sympathy but father a bogus affair of a gesture so long practised that it had in the end hardened into reality.
I was “cured,” yes. But perhaps in the process I had twisted my own personality considerably for the worse—and none of this was Raymond’s fault, but entirely my own.

  All this I wanted passionately to say, but none of it got said. There was a cheerful knocking on the front door, and Harry’s voice called, “I say you two, what are you going to do about dinner. It’s on now. Is Raymond going to come over and have it with us, Vicky, or what? May I come in?” He came, as he spoke.

  The spell was broken. There is nothing so putting-off as an interruption at the wrong moment. No, I would not suggest Raymond having supper with me in the bungalow.

  “Yes, you’d better, Raymond,” I said flatly, suddenly feeling rather tired, and by no means disliking the thought of a quiet hour to myself before Harry and Margaret came back for the after-dinner party I had invited them to.

  “What about you, Vicky? What are you going to do?” asked Raymond.

  “Me? Oh, I always have sandwiches and coffee sent over on a tray. I don’t like to leave Antonia alone in the bungalow, you see, even though she is in bed. And besides one full-size hot meal is as much as I can ever manage. But you’d much better go with Harry, Raymond, and have a proper dinner.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really Raymond,” I answered firmly.

  “Come on then,” said Harry, cheerful and obliging as ever.

  They went.

  So that’s that, I thought, as the door closed behind them. I shan’t have any more chance of private conversation with Raymond this evening and after this evening—the end.

  I went, rather wearily, to the bathroom, to wash and tidy up. Suddenly, to my own astonishment, I felt a sudden lump rising in my throat and tears stinging my eyes.

  Why was I crying? I honestly was npt at all sure. Because a day that had promised to be such fun—and indeed had been for the most part great fun—was ending miserably? Or because our marriage had smashed up five years ago? Or because I wasn’t now and never could be again the girl who had been “in love” with Raymond? A bit of all perhaps.

  * * * * *

  I very rarely suffer from insomnia. But that night I found I could not sleep.

  Earlier on I had pulled myself together with, I thought, total success. I had stopped crying, eaten my supper, entertained Harry and Margaret and Raymond when they arrived, said good-bye to Raymond in public with complete composure, and retired calmly to bed, confidently expecting to fall asleep quickly.

  No such thing. I became instead wider and wider awake. It was not unlike that night at Betty’s when my thoughts had got so badly out of control and whirled me, against my will, into a maze of fruitless speculation. The sensation was the same, and yet the trend of thought, on which I found myself ruthlessly carried away, was different. Then I had dwelt on the five-years dead past. Now it was the recent past, the meetings between Raymond and myself during the last few months, that forced themselves into the forefront of my mind.

  I felt that somewhere I must have behaved badly, or at least foolishly, I felt that things ought never to have come to such a crisis as they had reached that evening. I felt that I had in the good old phrase “led Raymond on” without ever thinking about his feelings. I felt that when at last I had (unwittingly) driven him to break down into honesty, I had given him no word of comfort or even comprehension. I had, it was true, been interrupted. But—as a sudden flash of insight revealed to me—what man who has just admitted to a girl that he is unhappy about her wants, in return, a priggish set speech about how she once had been unhappy over him and had cured herself? No comfort at all, of course—merely superior and irritating—it was lucky, after all that Harry had interrupted us when he did. Emotion should call forth a reciprocating emotion—not a burst of self-analysis. Post-mortems on the past are insufferable unless the present is so gloriously right that dissecting dead griefs and misunderstandings becomes a luxury.

  Yes, but surely I wasn’t arguing myself into thinking I ought to have burst into tears on Raymond’s shoulder? Quite honestly I hadn’t wanted to. (Ah, but later in the bathroom I had found tears running down my cheeks.)

  Raymond would never know that. Raymond, I did not think, had ever seen me cry. No lovers’ quarrels between us ever, no husband and wife tiffs. Much laughter, much passion, there had been in our relationship, curiously little else. For a long time we had been such “spoilt darlings” of life that there had been no occasion to learn, through experience, what the marriage service so continually hinted at in its antithetical cadences—“for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish.” No, we had not learnt. When the smash came we were caught unpractised, defenceless, with only pride to carry us, with heads high, through the shipwreck.

  Poor Raymond! How bitterly he must now be regretting that I had ever come into his life again. How much better for things to have been left as they were without this strange and bitter corollary to our ruined marriage.

  He would forget me again, of course. Everybody forgot everybody in time. Probably some day he would marry again—or would he, in view of his medical history, hesitate to do so? Surely if he was, as he said, cured, it would not matter that he had had T.B.?

  And what about me? Betty’s attempts to probe my feelings towards marrying again occurred to me. What did I honestly feel about it, supposing the chance ever occurred?

  I could not imagine falling “in love” again—not in love as I had been at twenty. That was, after all, only natural. I could imagine being strongly attracted physically by someone. I could imagine liking someone very much, thinking him “my sort,” enjoying his company. If I was lucky these two “some-ones” might be the same person, and, if I was even luckier, I should consider him a nice stepfather for Antonia. Even granted all this—what should I say?

  I must, by this time, have been in a ridiculously worked-up state of mind, for I found I could not fling the whole question aside as absurdly hypothetical. Somehow I felt that if only I could decide in my own mind under precisely what circumstances I would contemplate marrying again, I could succeed in slowing down my racing thoughts and getting at last within measurable distance of going to sleep. The idiocy of such mental gymnastics in the void at two o’clock in the morning fretted me horribly, and yet, try as I would to rid myself of such nonsense, I could not. Eventually, failing miserably either to reach any conclusion to my ridiculous self-imposed problem, or to put the whole thing out of my head, I decided that the one thing I really needed was a cigarette. I did not want to smoke in the bedroom where Antonia lay, all this time most peacefully asleep, so I got up and went into the sitting-room. There, with a sigh of relief at having escaped, at least for a few minutes, from my hot tumbled bed and from the thoughts which harried me there, I switched on the lights, gave a quick look round as one does involuntarily look round a room when one visits it unexpectedly in the middle of the night, decided a drink of water before my cigarette would be refreshing and went out of the door again leaving the lights on to go to the bathroom to fill a glass.

  Just as I was crossing the tiny hall the letter-box on the front door rattled gently.

  I stopped short, amazed, and, underneath my amazement, I am ashamed to say—frightened. Who was it? It could not be the wind. It was a perfectly still night. It must be someone. What could they want? Who stood outside there in the dark rattling the letter-box? Oh, why hadn’t I stayed in bed and gone to sleep arid not heard it?

  I am not frightened of burglars, and in any case a burglar would hardly rattle the letter-box. It is the supernatural, the mysterious, which, in stories or films, can easily set my nerves on the rack. As a child I used to read quantities of ghost stories and literally terrify myself. As an adult, with no psychic experience whatsoever, I can dismiss the whole thing as nonsense until a strange shadow on the wall, a dimly-lighted mirror in an empty room, or a mysterious sound in the middle of the night can suddenly light up again in one nightmare flash the whole eerie realm of these childish
terrors, buried deep now in my consciousness, but never forgotten. I suffered now a sudden awful vision of a skeleton hand, unattached to any body, climbing up the door and poking bonily about the letter-box. Night-gowned and barefooted in the semi-dark I flinched, shuddering hastily away from my own imagination.

  The letter-box rattled again.

  “Vicky?” said Raymond’s voice.

  “Raymond!” Relief, warm human relief, came flooding back on full tide. I opened the door and almost pulled him in. “I thought you were a ghost!” I exclaimed, hovering between tears and laughter.

  “I’m no ghost, Vicky. Vicky—darling!”

  I do not know quite how it had happened. It was my doing I am sure—but somehow I was clinging to Raymond, trembling, holding up my face to be kissed, and whether tears or laughter had finally won, I have no idea.

  “Oh Raymond! I’m so glad you’re not a ghost,” I murmured incoherently.

  “Darling! I didn’t mean to frighten you. It was only that I looked back just as Harry and I had passed your bungalow and saw a chink of light appear in the sitting-room—black-out rather poor, Vicky!—and thought I’d just tell you the car broke down and we missed our train and—”

  “Never mind. Never mind as long as you’re here. Never mind as long as everything isn’t miserable and finished and me awake not being able to stop thinking about it.”

  “Vicky darling! Are you awake? Am I awake. What’s happening to us? Is this us? Isn’t it all a dream?”

  I could feel his heart pounding painfully against his chest and knew that, while yet holding me in his arms, his mind was struggling to get free.

  “No, it’s not a dream. Raymond—don’t let’s be apart any more. Let’s be together.”

  “Vicky—darling. I don’t understand. What’s come over you? Are you crying or laughing?” Gently he tilted up my head in an attempt to see my face clearly in the half-light.