So the years went by, and such involvements as came along never satisfied me as being quite right enough either for one thing or the other. And one day, with jarring abruptness, I was twenty-seven, and the little inner voice stopped jeering and sneering at every man I met and began to whimper and bleat. ‘Is it going on forever, this lonely-nights policy? So supposing you never marry, and if you go on being so fussy you probably never will – are there to be no cakes and ale?’ And I began to be conscious of my unnatural state, and cry in the night sometimes for no real reason except that I wanted a man beside me – any man at all, I sometimes thought, and the little voice which had been so snooty before, now held its peace on the subject.
I kept thinking about the actor. I hadn’t seen him for seven years, though I’d heard about him now and then – he had graduated through minor journalism to publishing, and was now (I learned by well-placed casual questions) a leading light in a go-ahead new publishing house specializing in novels by Angry Young Men. He had married; the marriage had gone wrong. He lived alone now, in a small house in Highgate which he’d shared with his wife before she left him. There had been no children.
Once, in an idle afternoon when the feeling of uselessness which had lately beset me was particularly strong, I went out to Highgate and walked past the house. It was very ordinary, one of a row; the garden was a mess. The front door was painted bright yellow. It was the colour of a skirt I once had that he had specially liked. I didn’t really imagine he’d chosen the paint for the front door on that basis, but I liked the door being that colour, though it hurt stupidly by making me remember a lot of things. I came home quite convinced that I’d never met anyone since that I had had the same feeling for.
While I was being so damned honest all of a sudden, there was no use pretending any longer that I had chosen the obscure fishing village of Collioure for a holiday for any other reason than because I had heard he usually went there. Nor was it mere coincidence that I arranged my holiday for a special part of September. Jane-downstairs had remarked on men’s capacity for self-deception; women aren’t bad at it either.
At the time I told myself that I would take a train to Perpignan and from there explore the more accessible small seaside places just because they sounded nice and quiet and I hadn’t seen them before. Perpignan, had I expected anything of it, would have been a disappointment. It was hot and dry and there was a thin layer of grey dust over everything, including the famous plane-trees which languished ungreenly in the heat. Even the river was only a trickle among the parched white boulders. I wasn’t inclined to linger anyway; the day I arrived I caught a bus in the square which just happened to have Collioure on the front.
At Collioure there was a great castle built right on the sea, and little boats, and placid fat women in black stockings. There were widely-spreading nets forever in need of mending, and small rough cafés where you could choose your own dishes in the kitchen, and many painters. The swimming wasn’t very good; the whole place stank of sardines, and the noble castle turned out to be a youth hostel; also there was a forty-mile-an-hour gale blowing much of the time. But somehow I had no desire to move on. I drank Banyuls and went for walks round the dusty countryside, and lay in the sun, and waited.
And of course, he came.
We met one evening as I was coming out of my favourite café after supper. He was strolling down the steep narrow street towards the sea, his hands deep in his pockets and his shirt open at the throat, very pale and Londonish, looking about him with the fond, proprietorial air of an Englishman returning to a favourite spot abroad. In the purply warm twilight the tiny traces of time didn’t show; he looked exactly as always.
I felt my pulses beating with excitement as he came closer. If I had specially ordered the moment, it couldn’t have been more to my liking. I had had a week in this quiet place in which to relax and order my thoughts – a week of peace to sustain me for this encounter, not to mention a good meal and a half-bottle of wine just consumed. My skin was brown and my hair streaked with nature’s own blond from the salt and sun: my very bones seemed to have absorbed the heat and now gave it back in the form of a glowing sense of confidence and well-being.
He saw me standing there waiting in the warm light from the café and hesitated a second, then walked on a few paces, then stopped and looked back. It was delicious to watch; I could scarcely keep from giggling with delight. We stood looking at each other for a long moment; then he walked slowly up to me.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well!’ The pleasure was rich in his voice. I looked anxiously at him, partly to make sure the pleasure was really genuine (it would have been unbearable if he had thought me an intruder) and partly to see whether any of the magic was left. It seemed that there was some, because his face, which I knew was not handsome, with its thin nose and high, bony forehead and small mouth, had still some special quality for me which an unbiased analysis of the features couldn’t explain. I saw that he was examining my face during the same silence. We had discussed this business of how people’s appearance literally alters in the eyes of their lovers, and suddenly I blushed, for it seemed to me he must be remembering this too, and that we must be looking for the same thing, as one might take down an old book in a moment of hungry nostalgia and start to re-read, hoping it may provide the same remembered enchantment as before.
He saw my blush and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘Did you know I was going to be here?’ he asked.
I had about four separate answers ready for this one, but they all failed me. I dropped my eyes and nodded sheepishly.
He began to laugh. It was a laugh of happiness and male conceit, and I was so pleased by the first that I didn’t mind the second too much. ‘Oh, good, darling! Good, good, good. You’re just the same! could see you getting ready to lie, and then you just couldn’t. You always were the honestest woman I ever knew.’ He lifted my chin up and looked into my eyes with a funny, half-actorish solemnity, and said quietly, ‘I am so glad to see you again.’ Then he kissed me, and for a moment I remembered a play we were in together, when we’d done the same sort of kiss, starting with his hand under my chin and just our lips lightly together, and then developing into a full clinch; but by the time we were deeply embraced I had forgotten the play and could think only that this was like coming home.
I hadn’t come to this place with the conscious intention of divesting myself of my now cumbersome virginity; but from the moment I saw the actor again – certainly from the moment his arms went round me and I felt the sense of fond familiarity, of affection rediscovered – I knew it was inevitable that we should, sooner or later, make love. But there was no hurry. I was happy to let the pleasant sunny days go by. Now I had a companion to share everything with, someone I knew of old and with whom there were no constraints, and seven years’ news to keep the conversation flowing. Life was a slow, blissful progress towards an unnamed but predecided climax which we both realized was there, only waiting for us to reach it. We took our time.
We went sailing and swimming, and once we went out at night with the fishing-boats; we ate every meal together, and lay prone on the stone piers, reaching shoulder-deep into the water to catch the scarlet starfish, which petrified with fury when we lifted them out. We talked endlessly – there was so much to catch up on. And often we would lie together in the sun after a bathe, and kiss and caress each other, and it was a dear, familiar pleasure, associated in my mind and body with safety and mutual delight and no demands made; his hands were wondering and tender, and his face when I opened my eyes to look at it had the extraordinary beauty it used to have when I had given him even this limited sensual happiness. It pleased me immeasurably to know that he could sense the difference now, the promise of fulfilment, which would be the sweeter, it seemed to me, for having been so long deferred.
I was very happy; and if sometimes the familiarities in our relationship were of an irritating nature (like the way he teased me, as he had always teased me, about my sticking-out ears,
for instance) I pushed them aside and refused to acknowledge them – even when they were quite important, the sort of things on which the nagging small voice was once wont to pounce as reasons against any positive commitment. The voice was silent now; I was on my own. ‘And about time, too!’ I thought to myself. ‘This is right, at last; I feel it. I know this man. I’m taking no chances. He’ll look after me.’ I was thinking more of my mental welfare than any physical repercussions.
And so the end of my holiday drew near. In the last few days, our conversation ran out; we were often silent in each other’s company, and I took this to be a good sign. It put my mind at rest on one point – often in the last weeks we had seemed more like friends than incipient lovers; the silences now seemed to betoken a quiet awareness of the new status that would soon envelop us. I refused to consider that the silences lacked something – the quality that the silences between lovers have, of being full of unspoken thoughts. Ours were different; sometimes they seemed almost – empty. It was like waiting for something important to happen which has got to happen before life can go on. And I grew almost impatient, thinking, when is it going to begin? I knew the first time was seldom ideal and I wanted to get past it to the second and third times, and all the times after that, when our love could go forward and mature and develop.
Our last evening came. I was going back to London the next day; the actor was staying on for another week. It occurred to me this was not an ideal arrangement; I had a funny, cold feeling in the middle of dinner that perhaps we had been wrong to delay matters until this last moment, where there could be no immediate follow-up, when I must leave him the next day. But there was no going back now. Without a word having been spoken about it, it was settled between us, I knew; it had been from the beginning. It had seemed right and touching that verbal arrangements had not been necessary; but now I couldn’t help wishing we had spoken about it, and he had said, ‘Dearest, it shall be the climax of our wonderful holiday, and when I come home …’ That was really the reassurance I most wanted, the knowledge that what was going to happen was only a beginning and not just – an incident. But he hadn’t given it, and I began to wonder why he hadn’t. I began to want to run away.
I could hardly eat. My throat just wouldn’t swallow food, and my mouth was dry with an unexpected onset of acute nervousness. For once I drank no wine with my meal; it would have helped considerably, if I had but known, but it seemed wrong that one should need artificial stimulus. Always before he had only had to touch me for me to be ready for the final act which we’d always denied our-selves; there was no reason to suppose that wouldn’t happen again.
But it didn’t. Nothing happened at all. I lay on his bed later and strove to want him, strove to feel even a faint shadow of the sensations that had always engulfed me before, when I had known they must be frustrated. He did his best to rouse me; I listened to his tender words and felt his hands on my body, all in a cold agony of indifference. It was quite unbelievably terrible. And remembering it now, with the child of that night growing towards a life of its own in my body, I was appalled again by the memory of a frustration worse than any self-denial, which ended at dawn with us lying apart from each other, both pretending to be asleep but both staring with dry wide-awake eyes into a bottomless pit of dismay. I don’t know what he thought about, but what I thought about was how in God’s name we were going to be able to face each other in the morning.
Well, we did it somehow, of course. He tried to be nice about it, but it was fairly obvious he didn’t want me any more; and truthfully, I didn’t want him any more either, except in so far that I couldn’t bear that it should all have been for nothing – worse than nothing. I felt the most awful failure, and thought that perhaps if we could try again – since the thing was done, the point of no return passed – we might arrange things better, somehow recapture the basis of feeling we had had, which should have been a perfect foundation for a love-affair, but which we had somehow bungled and thrown away. It was like having jumped up and down on a beautiful springboard, relishing the thrill of the plunge into the deep roaring water, and then diving at last into an empty pool.
He saw me off on the bus. Up to the day before I had hoped he would come with me at least as far as Perpignan, to see me on my way; now there was no question of that, and indeed I could hardly wait to get away from him. We didn’t look at each other as he kissed me perfunctorily good-bye.
‘I’ll give you a ring when I get back,’ he said distantly.
‘Yes, do,’ I said. It was unbelievable; it was as if we were barely acquainted.
The long journey home was a nightmare of hot sticky carriages and not enough to drink (my thirst was terrible all day). I knew that soon I would have to come to grips with what had happened, to wring some meaning out of it to make it endurable; but for the moment I simply couldn’t bear to think about it.
When I got home I picked up the threads of my ordinary life again very quickly – you might say I snatched them up, and plunged into a round of work and social life deliberately intended to give me as few idle moments as possible. I grabbed at every invitation, no matter how uninteresting, that would occupy my evenings, and if I had one free I would fill it myself by visiting friends or, in the last resort, going to a movie alone. I carried a book with me everywhere, and read it desperately, over meals, in buses, even in the street. I wouldn’t think. I wouldn’t.
But at the end of the week, when I knew the actor was due back, I couldn’t prevent myself waiting for his call. Because I hadn’t sorted myself out about the whole thing properly, my feelings while waiting were a complete tangle – although I didn’t want to see him, I did desperately want him to want to see me. I didn’t see how I was going to live with the memory of him as it was; I thought there must be something we could do, just something; even one friendly lunch together might help.
He didn’t phone. My heart grew sick and I couldn’t eat, a phenomenon so strange that even Father noticed and asked what was wrong. I told him I was on a diet, which he believed. As the days passed I might have been telling him the truth, for I lost weight far more successfully than on any diet I have ever attempted. And then his note came.
Dear Jane,
Sorry I haven’t rung you, things really have been pretty frantic for me since I got back. I’ve got a brand-new job in Paris, leaving almost at once. Marvellous, eh? It’s a step up, too, I’ll practically be in charge there.
I wish I could suggest a meeting before I go, but it’s all happened so suddenly I just can’t see how I could fit it in. But I’ll be back one of these days, and we’ll have a slap-up meal together (NOT on the old X’s, I promise!)
Cheers,
Terry
Terry was his name, by the way. Not that it matters. I’d never call any child of mine Terry. It sounds too bloody weak-kneed.
Chapter 12
QUITE soon after the note, I began to suspect – what I had never even thought about, for some naïve reason – that I might be pregnant. Then it became doubly important not to think back, and so I never had, not until this moment. I had only known, positively though without details, that there was no help and no comfort forthcoming from the source, and that being so I shied away from any mental flashbacks which could only make me more unhappy and ashamed.
And now that I’d forced myself to take it all out of its cobwebby cupboard and look at it remorselessly from start to finish, I knew I had been instinctively wise not to do it before. If I had done it before, before my visit to Dr Graham, for instance, I’d now be sixty guineas the poorer and no longer pregnant. Sitting in my L-shaped room, stone-cold to my very marrow, with John still sleeping as peacefully as a child at my feet, I faced that fact, too, while I was at it; and also a few others.
For instance, that there were quite definitely no mitigating circumstances. I was not in love with Terry, never had been; I went after him, deliberately, because I was ripe for an affair and I thought with him I could have one and enjoy it and still f
eel like the nice clean girl-next-door afterwards. I saw now what I’d known all the time, only I’d hidden it craftily from myself because it didn’t fit in with what I wanted to do, that Terry and I had no basis for a love-affair; we were friends who happened to be attracted to each other physically, which was far from enough, and by thinking it was enough we’d gone against the very nature of our relationship. I also recognized that it was more my fault than his. That didn’t stop me from thinking bitterly that he’d got away scot-free.
I also had a look at the fact that Toby might well be – or have been – the man I’d been waiting for, though God knows I’d never have recognized him in a million years if we hadn’t happened, entirely by accident, to stumble into each other’s arms. The pool that had been so jarringly empty when I took my premeditated dive into it with Terry, I fell into with Toby and found it full of champagne.
But it was too late, that was the terrible thing. It had happened at a time when all I had to offer him was absolute misery for both of us.
Now I was thinking clearly and coldly. The doctor had been right. Who did I think I was imagining glibly that I could bring up a child all by myself? I had no money. I had no home. I had no job. And most important, I had no moral courage. I didn’t want the child, I wasn’t at all sure I was going to love it, even – certainly I’d had no hints up to now that mother-love hadn’t been completely left out of my make-up. Wasn’t it plain, common-or-garden cowardice, not the sturdy self-righteousness I’d credited myself with, which prevented me from ending the whole business? If only I’d gone along with the doctor’s proposals, it would have been over by now – completely and painlessly over, and any feelings of guilt I might have had as a result I would surely have dealt with ages ago. After all, as he had said – and now every word of our conversation came back to me as clearly as if played back on a tape – a woman has a right to decide, on the basis of her own capacity to cope with the situation, whether she is justified in going on with it. Justified – that was the word. It was the child that had to have first consideration, and what had I got to offer it that justified my bringing it into the world? Nothing.
The L-Shaped Room Page 16
